Basics: Use of alias at OS level in SAP

This is not very technical information, but I have seen still lot of basis folks working on some flavor of Unix do know adequate about aliases provided by SAP and if any fix command is being used frequently then add them to the alias list to make work more simpler.

Lets see, which aliases are provided by SAP in NetWeaver based environment.

These aliases are case sensitive, and if there will be more than one directory at the destination satisfying the regular expression [0-9][0-9]

For example if we have D00 and D10 then the command cdDi will not yield a result.

Similarly  below are the aliases provide by SAP for HANA server

If we want to know where these alias has been defined, go to home directory of <sid>adm user.

Execute this $> grep alias .*

You’ll see that approximately 4 hidden environment files are there in which these aliases are defined.

.sapenv.sh

.sapenv.csh

.sapenv_<hostname>.sh

.sapenv_<hostname>.csh

What is the difference between .csh and .sh file?

It depends on what your <sid>adm user uses are shell.

you can execute below command to know:

grep <sid>adm /etc/passwd

example

$> grep q1sadm /etc/passwd

q1sadm:x:437840:5922::/home/q1sadm:/bin/csh

This means that files with .csh will be used.

If I need to add my own aliases, In above scenario I will edit file .sapenv_<hostname>.csh

for dialog instance

alias cdW ‘cd /usr/sap/$SAPSYSTEMNAME/D[0-9][0-9]/work’

for Primary application instance

alias cdW ‘cd /usr/sap/$SAPSYSTEMNAME/DVEBM*[0-9][0-9]/work’

With this done, we need to log-out and log back in with <sid>adm, and execute cdW and it will take us directly to the work directory.

We can also add customer specific paths which are most commonly used to store backup files or installation files etc.

I know it was not a deep technical knowledge, but what I have seen playing with aliases needs to be done, its there for our help.

Thanks, for my other blogs please click on the below link

Ishteyaque Ahmad