[adrian_b]

True, but I think that the author did not mean this as a real useful example.

At least for myself, the main benefit of aliases is not to abbreviate the command name, but to change the default command-line options.

I strongly dislike the default command-line options of most UNIX utilities, e.g. cp, mv, rm and the like, so I never invoke them directly, but only through aliases that use what I consider to be the correct default options (for instance I consider that the default for any kind of copy command must be to make an exact copy of the source, instead of losing any part of the original information).