Apparently my bashrc is append-only:

export gucis=z1419539@gucis.cit.gu.edu.au:

For those who didn’t study IT at Griffith Uni, gucis is the student UNIX server. This particular shortcut was so that I could scp files over there more easily. Actually, given that gucis had open access to the Internet and my dorm room didn’t1{#footlink1:1243014118649.footnote}, it was far more often transferring files from gucis back to my local machine. I finally removed those shortcuts today.

My bashrc still has a legacy from gucis though. That was the first really serious introduction to UNIX I’d had3{#footlink3:1243014394631.footnote} and it had three handy little aliases installed5{#footlink5:1243014515100.footnote}:

export LS_OPTIONS='-F -G'
alias ls="ls $LS_OPTIONS"
alias ll="ls $LS_OPTIONS -al"
alias l="ls $LS_OPTIONS -l"

I doubt the LS_OPTIONS bit was there on gucis – I probably picked that up when I started using Linux and wanted to add the –color argument.

I suspect the value for PS may be original gucis too. If not, it was from very early on in my Linux experience and has stuck around ever since:

export PS1="[\u@\h \W]\\$ "

I think the only file that would come close to having as much history as my bashrc is my vimrc. It begins with the comment:

" Ammon's frigg'in huge vimrc. 50% of this beast was borrowed from others.

Since I’m not Ammon, 100% of that file is borrowed from others. Living without it is really very painful. Actually, I think it came from Ammon Skidmore in 2001, though the link to the file is now dead so I can’t confirm. Judging by this tweet, I suspect he’s still using it too. Thanks Ammon!

1 – Yes, believe it or not Griffith was that far behind. The network was only rolled out to rooms (along with phones) the year I arrived and obviously you wouldn’t actually let students do anything useful2 like use the Internet from their rooms… ↩

2 – actually given the massive bandwidth bill the weekend someone “accidentally” opened access to the Internet it’s hard to really say it was all useful… ↩

3 – I’d previously done a lot of work on UNIX but only as far as the arcview and arcinfo command set took me4.↩

4 – arcview, arcinfo and most importantly ps, kill and kill -9. It was Solaris so killall was something I was lucky to have no Linux-based experience of.↩

5 – as well as the less-handy-for-a-mac-user ‘alias dir=ls’↩