Repercussions to sharing .bashrc across machines with Dropbox?

Question

I work on a lot of different machines, all running Ubuntu (not always the same version). I have some really basic customizations to my prompt I would like to have available on all machines.

I currently use Dropbox and store all my other "dot files" there, such as my .vim/ .vimrc .gitconfig .ackrc. I then just link them to my home folder from my Dropbox folder. Voilà, all machines in sync.

I am unsure what the repercussions of doing something like this with my bashrc is. Can any one offer suggestions? Maybe an easy way to load a separate file in the bashrc?

Answer 1

I don't see any real repercussions, but I suppose it depends on what you have in there! If it's just quick aliases that work the same everywhere, and cosmetic stuff, I don't see any issues.

You could either just move your .bashrc to someplace in your Dropbox folder and then symlink it on each of the machines.

  mkdir -p ~/Dropbox/dotfiles
  mv ~/.bashrc ~/Dropbox/dotfiles/.bashrc
  ln -s ~/Dropbox/dotfiles/.bashrc ~/.bashrc

I actually have quite a few dotfiles in my home folder which are actually symlinks to shared folders in my Dropbox account.

Another option is that you could create a file inside your dropbox folder to be sourced by your .bashrc:

I.e., in your .bashrc, put:

source $HOME/Dropbox/dotfiles/bashrc-shared-settings

and then create a bashrc-shared-settings file which is the stuff you want used on all machines, and you can still keep separate .bashrc files.

(You can also abbreviate source as just . in bash.)

Answer 2

The main risk that I can think of is that you must remember that synchronization is not the same as backing up. Any mistakes will be synced to all of your machines.

To include a separate file in your ~/.bashrc add something like so:

if [ -f ~/.foo ]; then
    . ~/.foo
fi

Where ~/.foo is the separate file.

Answer 3

Usually, centralizing configuration files is a good thing! If you want to customize what runs based off of a given OS or hostname, you can do something like the following in your .bashrc:

export HOSTNAME=`hostname | cut -f1 -d'.'`

if [ -f ~/.bash/os/$OSTYPE.sh ]; then
    source ~/.bash/os/$OSTYPE.sh
fi

if [ -f ~/.bash/host/$HOSTNAME.sh ]; then
    source ~/.bash/host/$HOSTNAME.sh
fi

Then, create a .bash directory and the os and host directories under that and put any custom settings in files called <whatever>.sh where <whatever> is the os type or the host you want customized.

I keep all of these files in dropbox, and I have a bash script called link_dropbox in my Dropbox folder that helps me to facilitate linking them in:

#!/bin/bash

#Array of <source><space><link> target->symlink mappings
linkarray=( "~/Dropbox/config/bashrc ~/.bashrc"
            "~/Dropbox/config/bash ~/.bash"
            "~/Dropbox/config/vimrc ~/.vimrc"
            "~/Dropbox/config/vim ~/.vim"
            "~/Dropbox/config/ssh ~/.ssh"
            "~/Dropbox/config/screenrc ~/.screenrc"
            "~/Dropbox/bin ~/bin" )

#turn off globbing to split each entry on spaces
set -f
for entry in "${linkarray[@]}"
do
    targets=( $entry )
    #eval will expand the tildes
    eval from=${targets[0]}
    eval to=${targets[1]}
        #if the target exists and is not a symlink, err on the side of caution
        if [ -e "$to" -a ! -L "$to" ]
        then
            echo "$to exists and is not a link, skipping..."
        else
            #probably safe to delete an existing symlink
            if [ -e "$to" ]
            then
                rm $to
            fi
            ln -s $from $to
        fi
done

Answer 4

I keep my .bashrc symlinked in Dropbox along with lots of other config files (.gitconfig, .vimrc, etc).

I source a file called .bashrc_local at the end of it for other settings which I might want to keep machine independent.

if [ -f ~/.bashrc_local ]; then
    . ~/.bashrc_local
fi