this has probably been done before and it's not that clever. but i find it useful - it saves me adding aliases to .bashrc for machines i commonly ssh to:
This goes in a directory which is added to my path, and then gets symlinked to. the name of the symlink being the target machine, or an abbreviation of it.
# ls ssh-targets:
ssh.pl
box1 -> ssh.pl
box2 -> ssh.pl
so now typing box1 will ssh me to that machine (i then also obv get tab completion on machine names)
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $file=$0;
# what machine are we looking at?
$file=~s#^(?:.*/)?([^/]+)$#$1#;
my $dest;
# a config hash for expanding the name, and choosing the user.
my $places={
box=>{full=>"boxwithlongname"},
home=>{full=>"blahblah",user=>"alexk"}
};
# if i have many machines with the same long name - abbreviate to box
# (as in hash above), so box1 goes to boxwithlongname1 etc
my ($short,$number)=$file=~/^(\D+)(\d?)$/;
my $hash=$places->{$short};
$dest=$hash->{full}?$hash->{full}.$number:$file;
$user=$hash->{user}||"alex";
# and ssh to it.
exec("ssh $user\@$dest @ARGV") if $dest;