bash

Directory Structure

In order to setup and customize your bash shell, you must have the following:

NOTE

You can put everything in bash_profile if you want but I separated it into different files and sourcing each one respectively.

• .bash_profile
  • Used to initiate environment variables and source the .bashrc file
• .bashrc
  • Used to customize the prompt and have initialize shell functions like ll, etc.
• .bash_aliases
  • Used to declare bash functions and aliases that makes my bash shell easier to use. (Although splitting up functions and aliases to their own files is being considered since functions are getting longer and cluttering bash_aliases)

Keybinds

Here are some keybinds I picked up in bash that makes my life easier:

• TAB
  • Trigger bash completion to avoid having to type everything.
• ^w
  • Delete a word previously (like ^BACKSPACE).
• ^LEFT or ^RIGHT
  • Traverse long command lines horizontally, faster.
• ^r
  • Browse the bash_history

Applications

Here are the applications that really helps me in traversing the bash shell:

• fzf
• ranger
• grep
• ack
• ack
• nvim

Useful Concepts

Here are some useful concepts in the bash shell that is really useful

Everything is a file

Well, not just in the bash shell but Linux in general. I haven’t really fully grasped the concept of this until I got to learn terminal utilities like neovim.

The I understand it now moment was really big for me since after that moment, everything just fell in to place. It started with bash functions, then systemd services, leading to creating my own configurations for the applications that I use in the desktop.

Symbolic Links

I learned this concept in my first job. In my first job, we had to make use of multiple instances of [KVM]. My senior taught me that, instead of copying the file (OS image), you can use Symbolic Links to save on space instead. Each instance of [KVM] needed to be in a different directory since it generates multiple files as it is intialized.

A simple command like below, really helped with it:

ln -s /path/to/source /path/to/destination

Think of it as pointers in the C/C++ programming language. Instead of allocating space for each copy of a variable (in this case file), you can instead just point it to an existing variable and use that instead.