Use .bashrc.d directory instead of bloated .bashrc

Quentin ADAM
1 min readAug 28, 2017

Bashrc file or .profile are the place where we put the initialization of the bash/zsh/fish shell, and lot’s of software want to add a line here, mainly to init some environment variable, or change path (BTW there is a feature to do that on OSX). The result is a bloated, unreadable file for init. So, let’s split it in several files.

You will be able to list your init parts like this:

denis:~ waxzce$ ls .bashrc.d/
alias-vlc.bashrc
autoenv.bashrc
autojump.bashrc
commented-waht-isit.bashrc
dcos.bashrc
git-alias.bashrc
go_path.bashrc
hist.bashrc
history.bashrc
homebrew_management.bashrc
iterm2.bashrc
nvm.bashrc
path_local.bashrc
rbenv.bashrc
rust.bashrc
sdkman.bashrc

How to switch?

First, create a directory

mkdir ~/.bashrc.d
chmod 700 ~/.bashrc.d

Then add this to your actual .bashrc or .bash_profile (on top)

for file in ~/.bashrc.d/*.bashrc;
do
source “$file”
done

Then just split the file inside the ~/.bashrc.d directory with precise MYFILE.bashrc file. You’ll need to give them execution rights too

chmod +x ~/.bashrc.d/*.bashrc

Thank you to Yoann Grange for the picture

UPDATED with the suggestions of Jérôme Le Gal, Clément Delafargue & MarcAntoine Perennou using the awesome shellcheck.

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Quentin ADAM

CEO @clever_cloud PaaS cloud computing company. We industrialize IT management to help developer to be happy and efficient and make organizations move fast.