The directories common to all systems are added to the path later in the script. Each command requires different options to produce the same information. For example, on SunOS 4.1.x systems, you may want to alias ps to ps -aux . On HP-UX systems, the command to execute a remote shell is remsh , while on Sun systems the command is rsh . Be careful when aliasing commands.
Some administrators prefer to rename commands when using aliases.
This makes troubleshooting easier, since there is no need to distinguish between problems with an alias and problems with a real command. The actual command will be executed instead or use the full pathname to the command. When there are problems with terminal emulation, the problems are usually caused by vendors using proprietary emulators such as Sun's commandtool or HP's hpterm . A simple solution to this problem is to specify a terminal type of sun1 on the HP-UX system. A more permanent solution to the problem is to add the correct sun-cmd entry into the terminfo database.