Bring Your Own Bash_Profile

Inspired by Josh Wyatt’s great Hack Reactor talk on Bash-Fu (check out Wes’ post), I’ve been developing many of my own aliases to speed up my workflow.

But whenever I have to use the public workstations, I lose all my custom shortcuts.

With tons of help from Eric Schmidt, we discovered a quick & easy way to import these aliases into any workstation.

I uploaded my .bash_profile to Github, and setup bash.dsernst.com as a shorter url redirect to it.

Then to get the aliases, just run from any terminal:

curl -L bash.dsernst.com > tmp; . tmp

Wondering what that does?

1. First, curl grabs the file at the given url. It needs the -L flag to follow the redirect from http://bash.dsernst.com.

2. It writes the download to a file called tmp

3. Then it executes that tmp file to add all of the aliases. (If you’re in ZSh, use source instead of .).

For better or worse, the aliases are only stored for the current session, so it doesn’t leave a mess on the workstation.

If you’ve honed a specific workflow, it’s really nice to be able to pull down your custom scripts on a remote machine.