trying to create an alias in Ubuntu 12.10 but its not working

Question

I am trying to create an alias and I have added these lines in ~/.bash_aliases

alias server-python='open http://localhost:8000 && python -m SimpleHTTPServer'

alias ssh-saad='ssh saad@<my-server>' <my-server> is replaced by the ip add of my server. So in my ~/.bashrc file these lines are uncommented

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
    . ~/.bash_aliases
fi

and in my ~/.profile

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
    # include .bashrc if it exists
    if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
    . "$HOME/.bashrc"
    fi
fi

so I believe whenever I start the terminal my aliases should work but unless I run this command source ~/.bash_aliases its not working. Also for the 1st server-python alias I am getting an error

"Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console "

I have looked into these solutions here
How to create a permanent "alias"?
Ubuntu alias not applied in bashrc

but still cannot make it work. I would really appreciate if someone could point me out what I am doing wrong. I know the problem is very trivial, but I must be just missing something. Thanks in advance.

---

EDIT
ok now I know why I am getting this error

"Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console "

I should have used alias server-python='sensible-browser http://localhost:8000 && python -m SimpleHTTPServer'

I should have used sensible-browser instead of open.

Answer 1

ok I finally found one suitable solution for this problem. if there is a ~/.bash_login file and its not empty then ~/.bashrc file is not automatically loaded when we open the shell. if we move that ~/.bash_login ( $ mv ~/.bash_login ~/.bash_login_old)file then ~/.bashrc file will be get loaded and also it will load the ~/.bash_aliases file if the following lines are uncommented in the ~/.bashrc file.

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then . ~/.bash_aliases fi

one another solution which i can think of is if you dont want to rename or delete your ~/.bash_login file then what you can do is when you are in the shell just type this command $ bash and it will load the ~/.bashrc file.

Answer 2

"open" in ubuntu is /bin/open, described by open -h as "This utility help you to start a program on a new virtual terminal (VT)."

You the more general thing than sensible-browser is gnome-open, which is not installed by default (anymore?), and is provided by the libgnome2-bin:

$ sudo-apt-get install libgnome2-bin
$ gnome-open https://google.com    # opens https://google.com in default browser
$ gnome-open config.txt   # opens config.txt in gedit

I find gnome open so useful that I have the following in my (multi-site) bashrc:

if which gnome-open >/dev/null ; then
    alias o=gnome-open
elif which kde-open >/dev/null ; then
    alias o=kde-open
elif which xdg-open >/dev/null ; then
    alias o=xdg-open
fi

which would let you do:

alias server-python="o http://localhost:8000 && python -m SimpleHTTPServer"

and it would work most places.