Shell config subfiles

Large shell startup scripts (.bashrc, .profile) over about fifty lines or so with a lot of options, aliases, custom functions, and similar tweaks can get cumbersome to manage over time, and if you keep your dotfiles under version control it’s not terribly helpful to see large sets of commits just editing the one file when it could be more instructive if broken up into files by section.

Given that shell configuration is just shell code, we can apply the source builtin (or the . builtin for POSIX sh) to load several files at the end of a .bashrc, for example:

source ~/.bashrc.options
source ~/.bashrc.aliases
source ~/.bashrc.functions

This is a better approach, but it still binds us into using those filenames; we still have to edit the ~/.bashrc file if we want to rename them, or remove them, or add new ones.

Fortunately, UNIX-like systems have a common convention for this, the .d directory suffix, in which sections of configuration can be stored to be read by a main configuration file dynamically. In our case, we can create a new directory ~/.bashrc.d:

$ ls ~/.bashrc.d
options.bash
aliases.bash
functions.bash

With a slightly more advanced snippet at the end of ~/.bashrc, we can then load every file with the suffix .bash in this directory:

# Load any supplementary scripts
for config in "$HOME"/.bashrc.d/*.bash ; do
    source "$config"
done
unset -v config

Note that we unset the config variable after we’re done, otherwise it’ll be in the namespace of our shell where we don’t need it. You may also wish to check for the existence of the ~/.bashrc.d directory, check there’s at least one matching file inside it, or check that the file is readable before attempting to source it, depending on your preference.

The same method can be applied with .profile to load all scripts with the suffix .sh in ~/.profile.d, if we want to write in POSIX sh, with some slightly different syntax:

# Load any supplementary scripts
for config in "$HOME"/.profile.d/*.sh ; do
    . "$config"
done
unset -v config

Another advantage of this method is that if you have your dotfiles under version control, you can arrange to add extra snippets on a per-machine basis unversioned, without having to update your .bashrc file.

Here’s my implementation of the above method, for both .bashrc and .profile: