bash Archives • Page 2 of 2 • Linux Tips

How To: Reload Your .bash_profile

Today’s article is going to explain how to reload your .bash_profile. It will be just a quick and easy article, one that won’t take up much of your time. It’s not all that complicated, but it’s something folks probably should know.

So, most of you will probably have a .bash_profile. There are other shells, but Bash is the most common. That’s where they store various bash settings. When you make changes to the .bash_profile, the profile needs to be reloaded for the changes to take effect.

I’ve probably covered this elsewhere, though I did write an article to show you how to find out which shell you’re using. If you don’t know, Bash is the name of the shell and stands for Bourne shell. There are many shells, but Bash was the first one ported to Linux. Indeed, it was one of the first applications ported to Linux. It’s still widely used as the default on most distros.

There are times when you’ll want to edit your .bash_profile for additional functionality. It’s where you’d go to change things like terminal output colors and you could even add aliases to the file if you really felt like it. (Those should probably bo in .bash_aliases, for the record.)

With that in mind, I’ll show you how to reload your .bash_profile.

Reload Your .bash_profile:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Like I said, this won’t be a very long article. It’s not terribly complicated.

Let’s say you’ve made a change to your .bash_profile and you want it to take effect immediately. To do that, you enter one of the following two commands:

source .bash_profile

1	source .bash_profile

Alternatively:

source ~/.bash_profile

1	source ~/.bash_profile

You could also close all instances of the terminal and the new .bash_profile changes should take effect the next time you open the terminal. If you really want to have another way, you can reboot and the changes will take effect the next time you open the terminal as that too will reload your .bash_profile.

Closure:

See? I told you this would be a quick and easy article. It’s not all that complicated. You probably don’t need to reload your .bash_profile often, but now you know how to do so when you need to do so. Yup, it’s also another article. There are now more than 250 articles, by the way. Who knew that it’d turn into this?!?

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Let’s Delete An Entry In Your Bash History

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to delete an entry in your ‘bash’ history. It’s a useful skill to have, for any number of reasons. It’s not all that difficult and this shouldn’t be a very long article. Read on, my dear readers! Even a long-term Linux user might learn something – but I make no promises!

I’ve previously covered how to remove duplicates from your bash history. It may be worth checking that article out, as most of you are going to be using bash. Sure, there are other shells, but bash is the most common on desktops and servers. So, we might as well learn with bash.

If you don’t know, bash is both a language and an application. Unless otherwise specified, you’re almost certainly using bash when you open a terminal or TTY.

When you enter a command in the terminal or TTY, it’s saved to your bash history. In fact, it’s saved to the hidden file ~/.bash_history. If you so wanted, you could just open the .bash_history file with a text editor and remove lines as you wished. That works just fine.

However, in this article we’ll be using the ‘history’ command. It’s a handy command, useful for recalling previously entered commands and managing those stored commands. I guess this is really more an article about performing some very basic tasks with the history command. Like I said, it’s good for you to know this sort of stuff – especially as a Linux beginner.

Delete An Entry In Your Bash History:

So, with your handy-dandy freshly-cracked-open terminal, let’s just display your bash history. You’re going to do that with just the following command:

history

history

You’ll notice that every stored command from your bash history is assigned a number that’s shown on the left (or right, if you use a RTL language). Well, that’s how you delete it. You use that number in the following command:

history -d <command_number>

1	history -d <command_number>

You can use that command to delete an entry in your bash history, and you can do so as often as you’d like. While you’re there, you can also just plain clear your entire bash history with this command:

history -c

1	history -c

That will clear all of your bash history – more or less. Your current session may have not been written to the history at the time you issued that command. It might not be saved until you close the terminal instance. This makes it slightly more complicated to make sure the history is truly empty. However, it’s definitely close enough.

Anyhow, you might want to delete your bash history to remove commands that you’ve memorized. You might want to remove commands that didn’t work. If there are sensitive commands in your bash history, this is a way to remove them, surgically or en masse. There are all sorts of reasons why you might want to go through your bash history to delete past commands – and now you can!

Closure:

Yay! It’s another back-to-basics kind of article. In this one, we learn how to delete an entry in your bash history file. In some cases, it may be easier for you to just do so with a GUI and a GUI text editor. You don’t even need ‘sudo’ to make the changes and removing a lot of entries might be faster with a graphical application. Just remove the lines you don’t want showing up in the history any longer.

Also, I should mention somewhere that you can see the history by just pressing the up arrow, but I suspect folks will already know that. ‘Snot the best way to go about managing them, but you can see and select them, running them again as you wish.

Find Out Which Shell You’re Using

Today’s article is going to teach you how to find out which shell you’re using. Knowing which shell you’re using is important if you’re using an unfamiliar system. Most of the time, it’s something you’d already know, but once in a while you might need to find out which shell you’re using.

As you’re visiting this site, it’s fairly safe to assume you’re using Linux (or at least interested in Linux). In that case, you’re quite likely using Bash. Bash is the most common, from my observations.

If you’re curious, Bash is a replacement for Bourne Shell – and is ‘Bourne Again SHell’. It has existed, thanks to the Brian Fox and the GNU Project, since the late eighties. It’s pretty ubiquitous, pretty stable, and pretty feature complete.

While Bash is the most common, it’s certainly not alone in the field of shell options. There are other shells, from ZSH to Fish, or from Dash to Nushell. In some distros, you might find one of them installed by default, but it’s usually going to be Bash.

So, odds are pretty good that you will already know if you’re using something other than Bash. After all, you’d likely have been the person who installed the alternative. Still, there are a couple of commands you can use when you want to figure out which shell you’re using, for when you do need to know.

Find Out Which Shell You’re Using:

On the off-chance that you don’t know what a shell is, Wikipedia describes the shell as:

A Unix shell is a command-line interpreter or shell that provides a command line user interface for Unix-like operating systems. The shell is both an interactive command language and a scripting language, and is used by the operating system to control the execution of the system using shell scripts.

And now, with your terminal emulator open, let’s go about finding out which shell you’re using.

The first command you can try would be:

echo $SHELL

1	echo $SHELL

You can also use the echo command in a different way. It’s even a bit more clear with this command:

echo $0

echo $0

You can also use ‘ps’ which takes snapshots of current processes:

ps -p $$

ps -p $$

There are certainly other ways to find out which shell you’re using, but those are a few ways that are easy enough. If you have other ways, please feel free to leave them as a comment.

Oh, and here’s a bonus… If you want to see which shells are installed on your system, you can use the following command:

cat /etc/shells

1	cat /etc/shells

The output of this would look similar to this:

list of installed shells — This is the defaults from Lubuntu 20.04 LTS. Your output may vary, of course.

As I said, that’ll let you know which shells you have installed. In a future article, we might discuss how to change your default shell – but that’s something I seldom bother with these days. Bash works and works well.

Closure:

Yup… There it is! Another article. Now that the year is up, I’m not sure what to look forward to as a goal. I highly doubt I’ll make it a full two years, but it could happen. We shall see…