create terminal bash shortcuts

You can assign shortcuts for your most frequently used terminal commands by appending alias as many times as you did like to your bash configuration file (~/.bashrc). The syntax for alias is as follows.

alias yourCommand="YourTerminalCommand"

example:

alias la="ls -la"

alias gs1="ssh gs1.yourdomain.com"

Aliases shorten the amount of keystrokes necessary to throw commands.

I put my aliases in a file called ~/.aliases and then insert "source ~/.aliases" in my bash ~/.profile. That way it's easy to grab a copy of .aliases in case I'm doing command-line stuff on someone else's computer and don't want to mess with their .profile. 

I would advise that you only alias commands, that don't change your system or delete files. So don't alias "sudo" or "apt-get". When you're actually installing software, you want to do it deliberately, and you don't want the chance that a typo will actually do something that changes your system with elevated permissions.