What commands are missing from your bashrc file?

I had this strange idea one day while reviewing an article for Enable Sysadmin. I was curious what commands Linux sysadmins were using in their bashrc files. The bashrc file is a place to customize your Linux environment and create aliases which can save you time on the command line.

I decided to ask our Sudoers if they would share what aliases they created and used all the time. While I wasn't surprised by the great responses, I did find a few things to consider for my shortcuts.

The idea was that sharing this would inspire others to improve their bashrc savviness. Take a look at what our Sudoers group shared and, please, borrow anything you like to make your sysadmin life easier.

[ You might also like: Parsing Bash history in Linux ]

Jonathan Roemer

# Require confirmation before overwriting target files. This setting keeps me from deleting things I didn't expect to, etc
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias rm='rm -i'

# Add color, formatting, etc to ls without re-typing a bunch of options every time
alias ll='ls -alhF'
alias ls="ls --color"
# So I don't need to remember the options to tar every time
alias untar='tar xzvf'
alias tarup='tar czvf'

# Changing the default editor, I'm sure a bunch of people have this so they don't get dropped into vi instead of vim, etc. A lot of distributions have system default overrides for these, but I don't like relying on that being around
alias vim='nvim'
alias vi='nvim'

Valentin Bajrami

Here are a few functions from my ~/.bashrc file:

# Easy copy the content of a file without using cat / selecting it etc. It requires xclip to be installed
# Example:  _cp /etc/dnsmasq.conf
_cp()
{
  local file="$1"
  local st=1
  if [[ -f $file ]]; then
    cat "$file" | xclip -selection clipboard
    st=$?
  else
    printf '%s\n' "Make sure you are copying the content of a file" >&2
  fi
  return $st    
}

# This is the function to paste the content. The content is now in your buffer.
# Example: _paste   

_paste()
{
  xclip -selection cliboard -o
}

# Generate a random password without installing any external tooling
genpw()
{
  alphanum=( {a..z} {A..Z} {0..9} ); for((i=0;i<=${#alphanum[@]};i++)); do printf '%s' "${alphanum[@]:$((RANDOM%255)):1}"; done; echo
}
# See what command you are using the most (this parses the history command)
cm() {
  history | awk ' { a[$4]++ } END { for ( i in a ) print a[i], i | "sort -rn | head -n10"}' | awk '$1 > max{ max=$1} { bar=""; i=s=10*$1/max;while(i-->0)bar=bar"#"; printf "%25s %15d %s %s", $2, $1,bar, "\n"; }'
}

Peter Gervase

For shutting down at night, I kill all SSH sessions and then kill any VPN connections:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/killall ssh
/usr/bin/nmcli connection down "Raleigh (RDU2)"
/usr/bin/nmcli connection down "Phoenix (PHX2)"

Valentin Rothberg

alias vim='nvim'
alias l='ls -CF --color=always''
alias cd='cd -P' # follow symlinks
alias gits='git status'
alias gitu='git remote update'
alias gitum='git reset --hard upstream/master'

Steve Ovens

alias nano='nano -wET 4'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
PS1="\[\e[01;32m\]\u@\h \[\e[01;34m\]\w  \[\e[01;34m\]$\[\e[00m\] "
export EDITOR=nano
export AURDEST=/var/cache/pacman/pkg
PATH=$PATH:/home/stratus/.gem/ruby/2.7.0/bin
alias mp3youtube='youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3'
alias grep='grep --color'
alias best-youtube='youtube-dl -r 1M --yes-playlist -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]''
alias mv='mv -vv'
shopt -s histappend
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

Jason Hibbets

While my bashrc aliases aren't as sophisticated as the previous technologists, you can probably tell I really like shortcuts:

# User specific aliases and functions

alias q='exit'
alias h='cd ~/'
alias c='clear'
alias m='man'
alias lsa='ls -al'
alias s='sudo su -'

Bonus: Organizing bashrc files and cleaning up files

We know many sysadmins like to script things to make their work more automated. Here are a few tips from our Sudoers that you might find useful.

Chris Collins

I don't know who I need to thank for this, some awesome woman on Twitter whose name I no longer remember, but it's changed the organization of my bash aliases and commands completely.

I have Ansible drop individual <something>.bashrc files into ~/.bashrc.d/ with any alias or command or shortcut I want, related to any particular technology or Ansible role, and can manage them all separately per host. It's been the best single trick I've learned for .bashrc files ever.

Git stuff gets a ~/.bashrc.d/git.bashrc, Kubernetes goes in ~/.bashrc.d/kube.bashrc. 

if [ -d ${HOME}/.bashrc.d ]
then
  for file in ~/.bashrc.d/*.bashrc
  do
    source "${file}"
  done
fi

Peter Gervase

These aren't bashrc aliases, but I use them all the time. I wrote a little script named clean for getting rid of excess lines in files. For example, here's nsswitch.conf with lots of comments and blank lines:

[pgervase@pgervase etc]$ head authselect/nsswitch.conf
# Generated by authselect on Sun Dec  6 22:12:26 2020
# Do not modify this file manually.

# If you want to make changes to nsswitch.conf please modify
# /etc/authselect/user-nsswitch.conf and run 'authselect apply-changes'.
#
# Note that your changes may not be applied as they may be
# overwritten by selected profile. Maps set in the authselect
# profile always take precedence and overwrites the same maps
# set in the user file. Only maps that are not set by the profile

[pgervase@pgervase etc]$ wc -l authselect/nsswitch.conf
80 authselect/nsswitch.conf

[pgervase@pgervase etc]$ clean authselect/nsswitch.conf
passwd:     sss files systemd
group:      sss files systemd
netgroup:   sss files
automount:  sss files
services:   sss files
shadow:     files sss
hosts:      files dns myhostname
bootparams: files
ethers:     files
netmasks:   files
networks:   files
protocols:  files
rpc:        files
publickey:  files
aliases:    files

[pgervase@pgervase etc]$ cat `which clean`
#! /bin/bash
#
/bin/cat $1 | /bin/sed 's/^[ \t]*//' | /bin/grep -v -e "^#" -e "^;" -e "^[[:space:]]*$" -e "^[ \t]+"

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Wrap up

That's all. Having a personalized and efficient environment makes your Linux experience even better. The bashrc file is a great place to implement those customizations. I hope sharing these tips inspires you to update your bashrc file and saves you a few keystrokes.