Bash Customizations

Question

While I use Linux, I have not yet customized my bash shell, which I use a fair amount. So, I ask: What are your favorite customizations you have for bash?

Answer 1

I would recommend looking at zsh.

It is much more powerful, and you're ready for it if you're asking about shell customization.

Some killer features are path expansion:

cd /u/l/X<TAB> -> cd /usr/local/X11

and globbing

wc -l **/*.xml

(bash3 also does that, so there's some improvement)

And it is smart enough, so

for i in .*; do cp $i dotfiles; done

wouldn't land you in trouble or fail epically.

And it have a lot of options and a massive completions library.

Answer 2

A custom prompt is my first one. I've never liked the '$' :)

Mine own prompt is very personal to me though. It's multi-line for a start, which a lot of people aren't fans of, but it suits me fine. It's also version control system enabled - it'll report svn revisions / git branches if you're in a source tree.

Answer 3

• A bunch of aliases, some for typos some just to give me the behavior I want by default, some for less keystrokes.
  • emcas to emacs
  • ls to ls -lt
  • pu to pushd
  • po to popd

Answer 4

An important one for me is to add some color to the prompt. That makes it act as a visual delimiter when I've got two sets of output. I can easily see where one ends and the next begins.

Answer 5

• Colorize your command prompt

• Enable some shell options:

  # Make bash append rather than overwrite the history on disk
  shopt -s histappend
  # Enable cool globbing wildcards
  shopt -s extglob
  

• Add some aliases:

  alias ls="ls --color=auto"
  alias hd="hexdump -C"
  

• Colorize grep output:

  export GREP_OPTIONS=--color=auto
  export GREP_COLORS='ms=01;36'
  

Answer 6

Settings for the other prompts (continuation lines, select, execution trace):

#---------------------------------------------------
#  set Bash prompts
#---------------------------------------------------
export PS2='continue> '
export PS3='choose: '
export PS4='[$LINENO $SECONDS] '

Answer 7

I second the zsh suggestion. Though I'm pretty sure most of these will work in bash as well.

Notice the lowercase=command upercase=suffix-command convention. (some of these come from the zsh-lovers manpage)

alias -g bigfiles="find . -size +50000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print \$8 \": \" \$5 }'"
alias -g f="find . -name"
alias -g G='| egrep'
alias -g g="grep"
alias -g H='| head'
alias -g LL="2>&1 | less"
alias -g L="| less"
alias -g NUL="> /dev/null 2>&1"

As an ubuntu user:

alias 'Ag'='sudo apt-get install'
alias 'As'='apt-cache search'
alias 'Ai'='apt-cache show'
alias 'Ar'='sudo apt-get remove'
alias 'Au'='sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get dist-upgrade'

As a ruby user

alias Gs='gem search --remote'
alias Gg='sudo gem install'
alias Gi='gem specification'

Also you might spend a little time wading through: http://dotfiles.org/.bashrc. There are a number of gems over there.

Answer 8

1. I usually make sure to set up Bash Completion, because it I've gotten so used to it that it annoys me when I can't tab-complete hostnames with ssh.

2. I set up my prompt command so that the titles of all my terminal windows tell me what host and directory I'm in:

   export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${HOSTNAME}:${PWD}\007"'
   

   This way I don't get a bunch of windows titled "xterm" or "Terminal" or something similar.