On Tue, 2002-04-02 at 06:01, Mike Manchester wrote:
> You can execute everything in the .bashrc or .bash_profile or for that matter
> any file by doing
> strings .bashrc
> This way you can test your profiles without having to play windows and reboot
> after every change.
> Mike M.
Actually, not quite. The "strings" command will merely find all of the
ASCII sequences in a binary file and spit them to stdout. This does not
execute your script at all.
In a Bourne/Korn shell, you source it with the dot (".") command, ie:
$ . ~username/.bashrc
In a csh/tcsh shell, you source it with the "source" command, ie:
$ source ~/.cshrc
By sourcing a script, the commands run in your current interactive shell
rather than spawning a subshell to run the script.
What you are trying to do is get an alias to be sourced by every shell
spawned by the user. Remember, shells can be interactive or
non-interactive. Interactive shells can be "login" shells (Bourne shells
look at ".profile", Bash uses a ".bash_login" and a ".bash_profile",
Korn can source a ".kshrc") or "normal" shells.(Bash will look at
".bashrc").
The easiest way to do what you're trying to do is to put it in
/etc/profile so that all Bourne/Korn shells on the system will source
it, making that alias "global" to the entire machine.
If you don't want to make this global, add the alias command to BOTH
".bash_profile" (sourced by Bash in a login shell), and ".bashrc"
(sourced by Bash in a non-login shell). You may also need to add it to
".profile" as well if you ever start Bash merely by running /bin/sh (a
symlink to Bash, forcing it to run in compatibility mode).
Here is a snippet from the man page that might help:
When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as
a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first
reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if
that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for
~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that
order, and reads and executes commands from the first one
that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may
be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behav
ior.
When a login shell exits, bash reads and executes commands
from the file ~/.bash_logout, if it exists.
When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is
started, bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc,
if that file exists. This may be inhibited by using the
--norc option. The --rcfile file option will force bash
to read and execute commands from file instead of
~/.bashrc.
When bash is started non-interactively, to run a shell
script, for example, it looks for the variable BASH_ENV in
the environment, expands its value if it appears there,
and uses the expanded value as the name of a file to read
and execute. Bash behaves as if the following command
were executed:
if [ -n "$BASH_ENV" ]; then . "$BASH_ENV"; fi
but the value of the PATH variable is not used to search
for the file name.
If bash is invoked with the name sh, it tries to mimic the
startup behavior of historical versions of sh as closely
as possible, while conforming to the POSIX standard as
well. When invoked as an interactive login shell, or a
non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first
attempts to read and execute commands from /etc/profile
and ~/.profile, in that order. The --noprofile option may
be used to inhibit this behavior. When invoked as an
interactive shell with the name sh, bash looks for the
variable ENV, expands its value if it is defined, and uses
the expanded value as the name of a file to read and exe
cute. Since a shell invoked as sh does not attempt to
read and execute commands from any other startup files,
the --rcfile option has no effect. A non-interactive
shell invoked with the name sh does not attempt to read
any other startup files. When invoked as sh, bash enters
posix mode after the startup files are read.
When bash is started in posix mode, as with the --posix
command line option, it follows the POSIX standard for
startup files. In this mode, interactive shells expand
the ENV variable and commands are read and executed from
the file whose name is the expanded value. No other
startup files are read.
Hope this helps.
- Ian
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:35:12 EDT