Score:0

Ubuntu

Trying to add a line to my bashrc but it's not working

r-c-man

10/16/23, 9:44 PM

I am trying to add a line after I find some text to my .bashrc but I don't have my syntax correct.

Can someone help me.

I want to add the line "alias cls='clear' after the egrep line in the .bashrc file.

Here is what I have so far.

sed ':\egrep:a alias cls='clear' .bashrc

Thanks RC

1 + 2

sed

MDeBusk

10/16/23, 9:52 PM

I cn't tell exactly what you're doing from your example, so I'll offer [this article](https://fabianlee.org/2018/10/28/linux-using-sed-to-insert-lines-before-or-after-a-match/).

Artur Meinild

10/16/23, 9:57 PM

Is there a specific reason you need to add stuff to your `.bashrc` with `sed`?

Score:3

Ubuntu

steeldriver

10/16/23, 10:36 PM

I can spot two issues:

if you want to use : as a regex delimiter in the address expression, you need to escape the : itself not the following e character
you have an unbalanced single quote

So either

sed "\:egrep:a alias cls='clear'" .bashrc

or simply

sed '\:egrep:a alias cls=clear' .bashrc

since you don't really need to quote clear here (if you ever do need to embed a single quote in a single-quoted expression, close the quote and then reopen it i.e. '\'').

To apply the changes to the file in-place, add the -i command line option.

+ 3

fixit7

10/16/23, 10:42 PM

Why not add it to .bash_aliases? @r-c-man

r-c-man

10/17/23, 12:28 PM

Thank you. I actually didn't know about .bash_aliases. I do now :) I'm looking up Bash Startup files and it doesn't show that. It shows .bash_profile, .bash_login and .profile I guess it's different depending on where you look.

steeldriver

10/17/23, 4:21 PM

@r-c-man the `~/.bash_aliases` file isn't mentioned in the bash manual's section on shell invocation because it's not an intrinsic startup file; it's just sourced by the default Debian/Ubuntu `~/.bashrc` if it exists

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