Bashconf: Modular and Manageable Bash Configuration

Fed up with the long and unmaintainable mess that was my .bashrc, I set out to make something better. This is the result.

Model

Each of the standard Bash configuration files (.bash_profile, .bashrc, and .bash_logout) in the user's home directory is symlinked to a corresponding script (profile, rc, or logout) in the Bashconf directory (which is assumed to be ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/bash).

These scripts load the Bashconf utility functions, then use those to source the scripts in their respective .d directories (profile.d, rc.d, and logout.d) in the Bashconf directory.

Other interesting tidbits

There's a file in rc.d that will migrate your Bash history file to its proper home in ~/.local/share/bash/.

The files in lib/helpers contain some interesting shell functions.

• If you've ever wanted to reload (or just unload) a certain kernel module that sits at the root of a dependency tree, you know how fun it is to first manually remove each and every one of the modules that depend on it.

  lib/helpers/kernel's main attraction is mod-recursive-rdepends, which recursively lists a kernel module's reverse dependencies (and the module itself) in the order needed to remove that module:

  sudo rmmod `mod-recursive-rdepends soundcore` 
  

• rxvt-unicode supports various operations like window-(de)iconification, title-setting, and font-setting via escape codes.

  lib/helpers/rxvt defines some shell functions that make these operations easily accessible. It also changes the font, and will sometimes change your terminal type (TERM) to rxvt-unicode.

Caveats

Don't blindly use my configuration without inspecting what it does! It's public primarily for my own convenience; the fact that others might find it interesting or useful is very much coincidental, and there are likely several gremlins just waiting to ruin your day.

Of note is aliases.d/make, which will rudely expose those Make-based build systems that depend on rules and definitions in Make's built-in database.

Known Issues

• These scripts may not be portable to non-GNU systems or those with ancient (< 2.9) versions of Bash. I really don't know.

• Daemon scripts implementations (all two of them) are lacking: the ssh-agent script will happily kill the user's sole ssh-agent instance on logout --- even if the same user is logged in on another TTY --- while the dbus script implements only start functionality.

Author

Bashconf was written by Collin J. Sutton.

License

All files may be distributed under the terms of the Apache License version 2.0. See file LICENSE for details.