Dotfiles

All of my dotfiles are as universal as possible so they usually work on Linux, BSD, and Solaris. All of my systems use exactly the same dotfiles so I can easily move my home environment. Some of the universal dotfiles will source local dotfiles so you can customize individual systems. For example, the universal .bashrc sources .bashrc_local. The dotfiles sync script described below will not update the local variants. In most cases I find I never need any local tweaks with the exception of Mutt -- obviously the universal muttrc needs to source muttrc_local.

.dotfiles sync script

I have a shell script that I run periodically to get the latest versions of my dotfiles.

   .dotfiles

The first thing I do on a new system is get the .dotfiles script and then run it to sync all the other dotfiles. In the examples below you don't have to `cd ~` if you prefer to download the dotfiles into some other directory.

Running the following commands will erase your current home dotfiles (.bashrc and friends).

cd ~
wget http://www.noah.org/engineering/dotfiles/.dotfiles && chmod 755 .dotfiles
./.dotfiles

If you prefer curl use this:

cd ~
curl -o .dotfiles http://www.noah.org/engineering/dotfiles/.dotfiles && chmod 755 .dotfiles
./.dotfiles

The .dotfiles sync script never updates the .bashrc_local or muttrc_local or other *_local files.

I considered using something like Subversion to store these dotfiles, but I found this little script to be simpler and quicker for my needs. Plus tar, gzip, and either wget or curl are always available whereas I usually have to install Subversion on a new system.

my dotfiles

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

 dotfiles.tar.gz

You can browse the individual dotfiles here:

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

I try 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 warnings when I login on really old BSD systems.