There are two scenarios:
- You are using Linux
- You are using Mac Os X
For both you want to source
~/.bashrc in your profile that gets loaded, or sourced, when your shell for your terminal starts.
~/.profile is automatically source in your shell when it starts. So, if you go to your terminal and type
cd ~; ls -A, you will see all of your files and directories in your home directory (
/home/usrname/). You should see a file called
.profile. This is the file that is automatically "sourced" when you start the terminal.
If you want to add aliases and functions to
~/.bashrc (which is what I do), then you should (inside of
~/.profile add an if statement that checks if
~/.bashrc is a non-empty file and then source it.
To check if your
~/.profile already does this enter
nano ~/.profile. This will open it up in a text editor (you can use gedit if you know you have it or even vim if you know how to use it). You may get an empty text file (you shouldn't), but if you do simply proceed. If you do not see a line anywhere that says
source ~/.bashrc, then enter the following lines somewhere (put it in a reasonable place like at the end or beginning and not in the middle of an if statement):
if [ -s ~/.bashrc ]; then
This checks if
~/.bashrc is a non-empty file (with if
[ -s ~/.bashrc ]), and if it is such, it sources it. Pretty simple. Now, you can add any valid alias, function, variable, etc to
MAC OS X
By default, Max OS X sources
~/.bash_profile. To be able to add things to
~/.bashrc (which is, again, what I do in OS X, as well), then you follow the same procedure as linux. In the terminal enter
cd ~; nano .bash_profile. Check for a line that says
source ~/.bashrc and if it's not there add the if statement above (
if [ -s ~/.bashrc ]; then source ~/.bashrc; fi).
When writing an if statement, be sure to leave spaces between basically everything (for example
if [ -s ~/.bashrc]; then echo "found"; fi does not work because there is no space beween
] - the interpreter will think this is one word).
If you want to figure out how to check for stuff in an if statement better, go to terminal and enter
man \[; this essentially gives you the run-down of an if statement. For example,
if [ -f /path/to/file ]; then echo "it's a file"; else echo "not a file"; fi checks if
/path/to/file is a file and if it is prints to stdout accordingly. I always reference this as well for easier-on-the-eyes and quick reference: 7.2. File test operators.
I hope this helps. I remember how confused I was when I started all of this stuff (which wasn't too long ago); so, good luck with your future UNIX endeavours!