If you use an alias in a terminal, e.g. alias a=b it will stay in the current terminal, but if you open another terminal you have to set up the alias again. In order to make the alias permanent you can add the alias to the .bash_profile and this will apply it to all the terminals permanently.
My question is how to set up an alias for all the terminals but only for the current session, i.e. if I log out the alias is gone.
Thanks
The general concept is to create a file like .session_aliases which contain your session aliases, then put a line like (notice the spaces around the [, ], and the . before .session_aliases—these are required):
[ -f .session_aliases ] && . .session_aliases
in your .bashrc (or .profile or .bash_profile or whatever). Then you just need to set up a script, run at session logout, which removes .session_aliases.
However, a quick search for "xlogout" suggests that there doesn't seem to be a universal script that gets called when you log out of your session. So the answer is going to be display-manager-specific.
You didn't mention which display manager you use, so I'm going to assume lightdm (given that that's the standard display manager for Ubuntu and Ubuntu is the most common distribution). You can follow the instructions here to set up a logout script when you end your lightdm session.
If you use a different display manager, the procedure will be different. Google is your friend. :-)
Related
I'm trying to make a bash alias for traversing through a few folders, but the alias does not save after I close terminal.
I've already saved the alias in the .bashsrc file and have also have run the command . ~/.bashsrc.
Here's what I've done:
sudo nano .bashsrc
Inside bashsrc:
alias x = 'cd Documents/Photos/Family'
And then saved and exit.
. ~/.bashsrc
The alias works in that terminal window, but shows "command not found" if I restart terminal or open a new tab.
You should prefer setting your changes in ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile.
alias x='cd Documents/Photos/Family'
Also, remember aliases won’t be exported to subshells and while using this alias you always need to be present in the directory where Documents is present. I guess your Documents directory is present in home, so it would be better if you do something like:
alias x="cd "$HOME"/Documents/Photos/Family"
Just add this line to the end of both the files and save.
In simple language there are two types of shells for your case, login and non-login interactive shell.
Before starting of a login shell, .bash_profile is sourced and before starting of a non-login shell .bashrc is sourced.
So you should add your changes in both.
If you are on macOS, .bashrc is next to useless for your case. MacOS would treat every shell you open in terminal as a login shell. Although there are some exceptions which i don’t remember.
As mentioned by David in the comments, in some distros ~/.bash_profile is just ~/.profile (e.g. Debian, openSUSE, etc).
I have added several aliases to my .zshrc file and they ONLY work if I restart terminal or use the source ~/.zshrc If I just open terminal, then type the alias, it will not recognize it, until I call source ~/.zshrc
So I know it's not a problem with the alias I created, I just have to load up the .zshrc file every time I want to use them.
What is going on? How can I fix this?
Well, you don't expect that you only have to edit a file and then, by magic, all your current zsh instances somehow ingest the changes, do you?
From the zsh man page, section STARTUP/SHUTDOWN FILES :
if the shell is interactive, commands are read from /etc/zshrc and then $ZDOTDIR/.zshrc
($ZDOTDIR defaults to your $HOME). Hence, if you are in your terminal, you have three choices. Two of them you already found out (restart the terminal, source .zshrc manually). The third choice would be to just open a zsh subshell (by typing zsh).
Actually, there is a trick to do some "magic" in reading the file automatically: Zsh allows you to define a so-called precmd hook, which allows you to establish an arbitrary command to be executed just before a command prompt will be displayed. You could use it to source any file you like. If you want to use this feature, I strongly recommend against sourcing all of .zshrc. Sooner or later, you will have stuff in .zshrc that you don't want to be executed every time.
Instead, put your alias definitions into a separate file, say $HOME/.aliases, and in Zsh define the hook
function precmd {
source $HOME/.aliases
}
If you later change the .aliases file, you would still have to type a Carriage Return in your shell, in order to provoke a new prompt to be written and the precmd to be executed, but this is less cumbersome than sourcing the file manually.
Hi I am having a problem with setting alias in mac after I start the screen command, I have alias for working with git, like
commit=git commit
they work as I expect when I start my terminal (iTerm2), but then sometimes I use screen to have simultaneous instances in remotes servers and virtual machines I work with. After this the alias disappear(command not found).
Does anyone know why or how solve it?
To make the alias work, you must use the alias command. For example, to create an alias in Bash you do:
$ alias commit="git commit"
This works temporarily ie.: in your current shell. In order to make it "stick", you must put it in your ~/.bashrc. That will make it be sourced to all instances of Bash you'll invoke during your terminal session.
When you start screen, it starts a separate Bash too, so you'll be covered.
You write something about VMs. If you need this alias to work there, you must make ~/.bashrc on these VMs to have the same aliases. But that's the other story. You should already know how to achieve what you want.
You need to make sure your aliases are defined in ~/.bashrc to ensure they get included in all logins. You can test this out: edit your ~/.bashrc to include this line:
echo "bashrc"
And then edit your ~/.bash_profile to include this line:
echo "bash_profile"
You'll see when you start screen that only "bashrc" is displayed.
See this question for much more detail on the subject.
I set up some aliases in my .bash_profile on my Max OS X.
It works but when I'm opening a new tab I always have to load my .bash_profile file with this command:
source ~/.bash_profile
How can I make it work for every terminal I'm opening, even if I'm restarting my Mac or Linux computer?
If you use zsh , you can add source ~/.bash_profile
at the end of .zshrc file at the following path: /Users/YOUR USER NAME/.zshrc , then restart your Terminal/iTerm2 app.
Note that this file is hidden. You can press CMD + SHIFT + . in Finder to
see it, Or just open it in default text editor with the following command from terminal:
open ~/.zshrc
Update
You don't need to do this by hand, run the following command:
echo "source ~/.bash_profile" >> ~/.zshrc
* Dont forget to restart your terminal.
The files executed at the start may be several, usually ~/.bashrc for interactive, non-login shells. The kind I assume you are using.
If so, create an ~/.bashrc file and source ~/.bash_profile in it:
if [ -f ~/.bash_profile ]; then
. ~/.bash_profile
fi
This web site has a lot of information about this.
Study this image, as it is a condensed guide
If you do need to find out exactly which file is being executed, take a look at this web page. It has a lot of specific tests to find out what file is setting what.
Specific for Mac-OS (which is an exception and loads ~/.bash_profile) do as is recomended in the site linked in this answer AFTER you confirm that your bash is doing as explained there.
I know this is a pretty old post, but this problem comes and goes quite oftenly and a lot of laborous solutions are offered. The fact is: being aware of a simple info would solve this pretty fast and easy:
LINUX/Unix OS will load the profile files on startup following the rules below (some distros may have other files names, mainly for user local profiles, but the main rule follows this):
Login Shell
First and foremost: /etc/profile is loaded (global settings);
Next: ˜/.bash_profile (local user settings- other files may be found, like ˜/.profile, depending on the distro. Check documentation).
So, if you are in a Login Shell environment, put all your crazy stuff inside ˜/.bash_profile (or the file provided by your distro) and everything will be fine.
Non-login Shell
First and foremost: /etc/bashrc (some distros will load bash.bashrc);
The next file to be seeked and loaded is ˜/.bashrc
And that's why so many people (just like me) got frustrated having to source their ˜/.bash_profile every single time a Terminal was loaded. We were simply inserting info in the "wrong" file- regarding the kind of shell loaded (see above: login, non-login).
More details on variants of the files mentioned above and some info on login vs non-login shell can be found here.
Hope it helps \o/
it seems that we will put
source ~/.bashrc
in our .bash_profile anyway. So why not just use one file, say .bashrc ?
Because there may be things you only want to do once per login (so in .bash_profile) rather than every time an xterm or the like opens (as per .bashrc), for example asking the user for a passphrase to decrypt and load SSH keys into an ssh agent, etc etc.
You can put some things in .bash_profile that are not appropriate for a shell instance that is not a terminal. For example, if you ran an external command from your editor through the shell - the shell instance would source .bashrc but not .bash_profile. For example, I might put alias ls=ls -F in my profile, but you wouldn't want that alias applied for just any instance of the shell, just ones you would interact with.