Dotfiles

my dotfiles

I keep all of my beloved UNIX home directory dotfiles in an gzip archive here:

   dotfiles.tar.gz

Some of the more interesting UNIX dotfiles to me are:

• .bashrc
• .bash_aliases
• .vim/
• .vimrc
• .inputrc
• .lynxrc
• .mailcap
• .pythonrc
• .screenrc
• .fonts/
• .mutt/
• .subversion/

I tried to get all of the bash dotfiles to work on both Linux and BSD, with Linux being favored. I don't like my dotfiles to depend too much on the platform I'm running on, but this doesn't always work too well with older BSD systems. It's harmless when it fails. Sometimes I get warning when I login on really old BSD systems.

.dotfiles sync script

I have a shell script that I can run to periodically pull down the latest versions and update my home directory:

   .dotfiles

The first thing I do on a new system is grab the .dotfiles script and then run it to download and sync all the other dotfiles. You have to chmod 755 the script to run it.

# wget http://www.noah.org/engineering/dotfiles/.dotfiles
# chmod 755 .dotfiles
# ./.dotfiles

The strategy that I use is to have all of my systems use exactly the same dotfiles. Of course, I want some options to be unique to each local machine. To handle this I have each dotfile include a local version that is not updated by the dotfiles sync script. For example, the .bashrc file includes .bashrc_local.

I considered using something like SVN to store these dot files, but I found this little script simpler and quicker for my needs.

more dotfiles

www.dotfiles.com has lots of dotfiles. Lots!