Basic Bash Configuration Files

From UMaine Supercomputer

Contents 1 Introduction 2 .bashrc 3 .bash_profile 4 Various Tips

Introduction

Your shell environment can be personalized using files in your home directory. In general you should have at least a very basic configuration file so that your shell works on all our machines.

For the bash shell (the default) this is done by two files in your home directory ( .bash_profile and .bashrc ). Note the period at he start of each name. Normally these are hidden to ls, but if you type ls -a you will see them. Normally, the .bash_profile file is read by a login shell (when you log in) and the .bashrc is read by non-interactive shells (such as when you do a one line ssh command to a node).

Below are examples of very basic files.

The same structure is available for the other popular shell, tcsh, but you will need to build our own files.

.bashrc

# .bashrc

# User specific aliases and functions
source /etc/profile
# Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
       . /etc/bashrc
fi

.bash_profile

# .bash_profile
 
# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
       . ~/.bashrc
fi

# User specific environment and startup programs

Various Tips

• Color output for ls

UNAME=`uname`
if [ "$UNAME" == "Linux" ]; then
   alias ls='ls --color=auto'
fi
  
if [ "$UNAME" == "Darwin" ]; then
   export TERM=xterm-color
   alias ls='ls -G'
fi