bash alias of the day: reader

I have some PDFs that have to be reviewed in Adobe Reader, because they include "comments" that OS X "Preview" can't display and edit.

This alias has saved me hours of frustration:

alias reader='open -a /Applications/Adobe\ Reader.app'

Now I can simply type "reader" instead of, say, "cat", and view the PDF:

reader Limoncelli_Ch13_jh.pdf

For those of you that are unfamiliar with Adobe Acrobat Reader, it is Adobe's product for distributing security holes to nearly every computer system in the world. It is available for nearly every platform, which makes it a very convenient way to assure that security problems can be distributed quickly and globally. Recently Adobe added the ability to read and display PDFs. Previously I used Oracle Java to make sure all my systems were vulnerable to security problems, but now that Reader can display PDFs, they're winning on the feature war. I look forward to Oracle's response since, as I've always said, when it comes to security, the free market is oh so helpful.