~/.bashrc

[Edit: 2005-03-14] I discovered I didn’t explain this nearly enough, so I’m going back and providing a little more detail as to how this all works.

It’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve finally got my bashrc files to a setup I’m pretty happy with. I’ve provided it here in hopes that others might find it useful…

The main thing I was trying to accomplish here was to have a single set of files that I could use on all the machines I work on. This becomes more complicated considering what I use… my personal machine is MacOS X, this website is hosted on Linux, and my primary development machine at UofM is SunOS. Additionally, there are certain settings I want on all Visible School machines (regardless of OS or hostname) but no others. Additionally, I like to have a minimalistic terminal prompt, so I use color to know what host I’m connected to. What I ended up with is this ~/.bashrc.

This file is basically a launchpad for all of my other files, so let me explain how this all works line by line…

HOST=`hostname | sed "s/\..*$//"`
DOMAIN=`hostname | sed "s/^[^\.]*//" | sed "s/^\.//"`

First, I need to know the hostname and the domain of the machine I’m presently using. I’ve found the above one-liners to work on every operating system I’ve tested so far.

[ -f /etc/bashrc ] && [ -r /etc/bashrc ] && source /etc/bashrc

If the machine has a system-wide bashrc that is readable, go ahead and execute that. This is where a system administrator may setup PATHs specific to this machine.

[ -f ~/.bash/all ] && [ -r ~/.bash/all ] && source ~/.bash/all

~/.bash/all.pre.login contains things that should be used by all machines… things like my name, default editor, various aliases, etc, as well as a custom function to setup my prompt