History
In Unix, aliases were introduced in the C shell and thus survive in descendent shells such as tcsh and bash. C shell aliases were strictly limited to one line in a shell language where all complex constructs required more, but still useful for creating simple shortcut commands. Aliases were absent from the Bourne shell, which had the more powerful facility of functions. The alias concept was imported into Bourne Again Shell (bash) and the Korn shell (ksh). Shells such as these, that support both functions and aliases, recommend using functions where possible. Cases where aliases are necessary include the use of chained aliases (bash and ksh).
Read more about this topic: Alias (command)
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