Device Aliases

A device alias, or simply, alias, is a shorthand representation of a device path.

For example, the alias disk may represent the complete device path name:

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/sbus@1f,0/esp@0,40000/sd@3,0:a

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Systems usually have predefined device aliases for the most commonly used devices, so you rarely need to type a full device path name.

Table 1-2 describes the devalias command, which is used to examine, create, and change aliases.

Table 1-2 Examining and Creating Device Aliases

Command	Description
devalias	Display all current device aliases.
devalias alias	Display the device path name corresponding to alias.
devalias aliasdevice-path	Define an alias representing device-path. If an alias with the same name already exists, the new value supersedes the old.

User-defined aliases are lost after a system reset or power cycle. If you want to create permanent aliases, you can either manually store the devalias command in a portion of non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) called nvramrc, or use the nvalias and nvunalias commands. (See Chapter 3, Setting Configuration Variables, for more details.)