hello friends,
I am looking for a way to do what I described in the title. When running command command, I dont want to have to type SOME_ENV_VAR=value command every time, especially if there are multiple.
I am sure youre immediately thinking aliases. My issue with aliases is that if I do this for several programs, my .bashrc will get large and messy quickly. I would prefer a way to separate those by program or application, rather than put them all in one file.
Is there a clean way to do this?
Put your aliases in .bash_aliases
Make sure your .bashrc sources .bash_aliases like this:
if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then . ~/.bash_aliases fiYou could source an
aliases.shfile on your .bashrc where you define your aliases, so that they don’t fill up your bashrc.For example, in your bashrc:
source ~/.aliases.shThis way you could also create a file with aliases per program.
FYI:
$HOME/.bash_aliasesis standard and most distros’.bashrcwill source that file by default.That’s a good idea, but it only makes the problem a little better. I still wouldn’t want one large aliases.sh file with environment variables for every application I customized. Would rather have them separate somehow without gobbling up a file
If you were using Zsh, one way you could do this is by autoloading function files from a folder in your
fpath.Let’s say you’re using
~/.local/share/zsh/site-functionsfor your custom functions. To ensure that folder is an early part of yourfpath, put something like this within your.zshrc:typeset -U fpath=(~/.local/share/zsh/site-functions $fpath)Then let’s say you want to override the
uptimecommand. Add a file~/.local/share/zsh/site-functions/uptimewith content like:NO_COLOR=1 =uptimeExplanation for the second
=:`=' expansion If a word begins with an unquoted `=' and the EQUALS option is set, the remainder of the word is taken as the name of a command. If a command ex‐ ists by that name, the word is replaced by the full pathname of the command.The last thing you need to do is mark it for autoloading, in your
.zshrc:autoload -Uz uptimeInstead of listing those functions manually as arguments, you could instead use a glob pattern to collect all those names, excluding any which begin with
_(completion functions):autoload -Uz ~/.local/share/zsh/site-functions/[^_]*(:t)Is there some reason you just don’t export those env vars in
$HOME/.bashrcor$HOME/.bash_profile?export SOME_ENV_VAR=valueIf it’s every time you run the command, seems like it should be set globally.
Because it’s not as maintainable as separating them by application or some other separation. Would not want to fill up my bashrc with single-application specific code.
You could break it out into other files if you really got that much going on. But if you really have hundreds or more env vars, maybe you should re-think using env vars at all.
Hard to give a rec without more detail, so I don’t really get it.
