Alias

• to replace a long, complex name with a short one (for convenience).
• to preserve the anonymity of a user's or site's "real name" (for security).
• to create an equivalence between a common default name (such as home.html or index.html, both common Web home page default names) and less well-known, actual names (such as html4dum.html, the home page for the HTML for Dummies Web site, which for predictability is aliased to home.html, index.html, and default.html, to cover most of the common possibilities).

In the UNIX world, many different kinds of aliases exist: aliases for file names, user names, and system commands.

URLs:

Alias

A definition from "Aether madness," one of the better on-line glossaries, which takes an e-mail look at aliases, rather than the more general perspective we use here.

RFC 1392

The Internet User's Glossary is the name of an informational RFC available on the Web at this address; in addition to defining alias, it covers a great deal of other Internet- and Web-related jargon.

W3E References:

host

IP address

host system

Detail:

A hostname may have an alias, which is another name associated with a single numeric Internet (IP) address. For example, in the UNIX Hosts database, the first two fields on a line will consist of the Internet address and the official hostname. All others on that line are considered to be aliases. A hostname alias can denote that the host bearing the alias offers a particular network service, such as FTP or World Wide Web (e.g. www.xyzcorp.com might be an alias for xyzcorp.com, to indicate that the xyzcorp.com host can also deliver Web access).