Show off your ~/.profiles

I don’t know since when, but I guess starting early on from „How to get access to the university machines (which are of course Linux-only) without looking like a total noob“, I was fascinated about these matrix-like command-line-ninja-people and decided to become on as well (which worked out quite good, I guess!). I can still remember the first lines, the exercise-sheet read:

"ls -la" lists all your files in the current folder
1. Create an alias "ll" for the command "ls -la"
Hint: you can add aliases to your ~/.bashrc [...]

Of course, I thought what the hell is a ~/.bashrc?? Then I found it among the files in my home directory and opened it (second thoughts: how the hell do you edit text files in this linux-bash-thingy? :D).

I finally figured it out, and somewhere down the line you see something like this:

# uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned
# off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window
# should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt
#force_color_prompt=yes

Yes, I can do that! So you quickly remove the comment hash in front of the force_color_prompt (how quickly depends on your vim-skills of course :)), hit the Esc+:+w+q+!, and restart your bash. Color prompt, success!

Endless possibilities, I wanna be a shell-ninja one day! Of course, back then it ended in a huge amount of non-sense aliases, but some commands still last until today – in my ~/.profiles, on almost every machine I use:

Lastly I have to say, I didn’t stop there…but the tales about my epic ASCII-Art motds is beyond the scope of this post… 😉