Built-In Aliases and Group Aliases

Almost every CLI command has an alias that allows you to abbreviate the command's name. (An alias is one or more characters that the Tcl interprets as a command or command argument.)

Note:   The "alias" command lets you create your own aliases.

After a few minutes of entering CLI commands, you will quickly come to the conclusion that it is much more convenient to use the command abbreviation. For example, you could type:

dfocus g dhalt

(This command tells the CLI to halt the current group.) It is much easier to type:

f g h

While less-used commands are often typed in full, a few commands are almost always abbreviated. These command include dbreak (b), ddown (d), dfocus (f), dgo (g), dlist (l), dnext (n), dprint (p), dstep (s), and dup (u).

The CLI also includes uppercase "group" versions of aliases for a number of commands, including all stepping commands. For example, the alias for dstep is "s"; in contrast, "S" is the alias for "dfocus g dstep". (The first command tells the CLI to step the process. The second steps the control group.)

Group aliases differ from the kind of group-level command that you would type in two ways:

• They do not work if the current focus is a list. The g focus specifier modifies the current focus, and it can only be applied if the focus contains just one term.
   
• They always act on the group, no matter what width is specified in the current focus. Therefore, dfocus t S does a step-group command.