Editing Archives - ComputerLamp

In this post we made aliases… now we want to save them in a file; bash has such a file called the .bashrc file. It’s also known as the bash configuration file.

That period before the name is very important, without it it isn’t the right file. It also means that the filename is hidden from view when you do a ls. You have to use the ls -a flag in order to see it.

But this post isn’t about ls, it’s about the .bashrc file. We’re going to use nano, that useful editor we talked about in the last post, to edit the file.

I’ll start with opening the file in nano:

Editing .bashrc with nano

I did this with the command:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ nano .bashrc

Now I’ll type those two alias commands that I used before. I aliased more to less and history to whatIdid:

Adding Aliases to the .bashrc file

And now we save the file:

Saving .bashrc with nano

Well, so now what? I edited the file, I added those two lines, and saved it… just don’t forget to exit nano when you’re done with control-X!

Once we created the file, we need to use it. Otherwise, we just saved our aliases in a file to do nothing.

It’s called sourcing the file. The command to do it is:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ . .bashrc

See that dot before the .bashrc? Be sure to type it. That’s how bash knows to use its configuration file. Also, every time you open up a new terminal, you’ll have those aliases. And you’ll be able to see them with the alias command.

You can also look at what you’ve got aliased by using:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ cat .bashrc

The output is exactly the same, no matter which one you use. It looks like:

alias less='more'
alias whatIdid='history'

The .bashrc has other uses aside from aliases, we’ll talk about more in the future.

In this post we created files using the echo command, now we want something more complex. The answer is to use an editor. Now this isn’t an editor like the guy who works for a newspaper, this is a program that lets us create, save, change, and otherwise fiddle with a file. We’re going to use one called nano.

In the Linux© community, a good way to start an argument is to ask a group of people what the best editor is. It’s kind of like asking who the best superhero is (I’m told Deadpool. I personally like Iron Man… or even Hawkeye… Black Widow is cool… see what I mean?) or which is better, Marvel or DC? So we’re not going to talk about best editor, we’re going to start with an easy one.

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ nano

This is what it looks like:

The nano editor

I can type whatever I want into this screen, like this:

Editing with nano

I can save it with the key combination control-O:

Saving with nano

I just have to tell it what filename I want. I’m going to save it as nano.txt.

Then, when I’m done, I’ll exit nano:

Exiting nano

And now I can create, edit and save a file. What if I want to edit the file again?

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ nano nano.txt

That brings up that file I just created.

nano has a man page, and it even explains why it’s called nano:

NANO(1)                                                                                NANO(1)

NAME
       nano - Nano's ANOther editor, an enhanced free Pico clone

SYNOPSIS
       nano [OPTIONS] [[+LINE,COLUMN] FILE]...

There’s also help available within nano, if you use the key combination control-G you’ll get a help screen that looks like:

Help within nano

nano is one of the easiest editors to use, which is awesome because we no longer have to rely on echo! It also creates what are called text files, which means that what you type in is what you get.

ComputerLamp

Lighting the way to Linux®

Category Archives: Editing

The bashrc file

Nano! Creating, Changing and Saving Files