BASH Shortcuts

The following is a list of shortcuts Pratt students may want to add to their .bashrc profile. This, first of all, assumes that they are using the bash shell. To check this, type

echo $SHELL 

If the result is

/bin/bash

than this page applies to you; if not, see the TCSH Shortcuts page.

If you are a bash shell user, you will also need to have a .bash_profile in your CIFS home directory (the ~ directory) for the shortcuts to work. The contents of the profile should be:

# .bash_profile

# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
      . ~/.bashrc 
fi  

# User specific environment and startup programs
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

export PATH

Stayin' Alive

There is currently a 10-minute inactivity timeout on remote logins. In order to eliminate this, add the following line to your .bashrc file:

xeyes -geometry 1x1-1-1 &

This will start the xeyes program off screen and in the background. With this program running, however, your session will not time out. If that puts an xeyes window on your screen, try

xeyes -geometry 1x1-1-100 &

instead.

latex and dvipdf in One Command

Now that you need to run both latex and dvipdf to get a PDF file for evince to look at, you may want to have a shorter way than having to type

latex FILE.tex
dvipdf FILE.dvi

every time. To make a /bin/bash shortcut for that, add the following to your .bashrc file:

ltx() {
MyFile=$1
MyFile=${MyFile%%.*}
latex $MyFile.tex
dvipdf $MyFile.dvi
}

Note that to use it, you do not need to include the ".tex" at the end of your file name, but you can. The script will automatically take the extension off whatever you gave as an input.

If you want a version that does some basic error-checking, use this one:

ltx() {
MyFile=$1;
MyFile=${MyFile%%.*}
 
if [[ -f $MyFile.tex ]]
then
   latex $MyFile.tex
   dvipdf $MyFile
else
  echo "*ERROR*: '$MyFile.tex' not found"
fi
}

From that point on, once the .bashrc runs to start your session, you can simply type

ltx FILE

or

ltx FILE.tex

and it will run

latex FILE.tex
dvidf FILE.dvi

Add, Commit, and Push to Git All In One!

If you want t a short command that you can use to add files to a repository, commit them all, and push them, here's a shortcut for that:

gitdone() {
git add .
git commit -a -m $1
git push
}

You must include a message when using this; for instance,

gitdone 'My Message'