Better way of piping string into bashrc

Question

Currently, I have a script that adds lines into .bashrc. Here are a few of the lines. I feel this is not the most elegant way to do this. Is there a better way?

echo 'echo -e "\033[1mhtop\033[0m \033[3m(Display dynamic real-time information about running processes)\033[0m"' >> ~/.bashrc && \
echo 'echo -e "\033[1mneofetch\033[0m \033[3m(CLI tool to display information about your operating system, software and hardware)\033[0m"' >> ~/.bashrc && \
echo 'echo -e "\033[1mnethogs =\033[0m eg; sudo nethogs \033[4meno1\033[0m \033[3m(Monitor bandwidth usage per process)\033[0m"' >> ~/.bashrc

Note you are not piping, you are re-directing. – ctrl-alt-delor Nov 13 '18 at 12:56 — ctrl-alt-delor, Nov 13 '18 at 12:56
Maybe `motd` is something you want. – Walter A Nov 13 '18 at 13:44 — Walter A, Nov 13 '18 at 13:44

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 13 '18 at 06:57

0

cat <<EOF >>~/.bashrc
blabla
blabla
blablablalba
EOF

answered Nov 13 '18 at 06:57

Ipor Sircer

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Can you provide some explanation to your answer to assist future readers? – WhatsThePoint Nov 13 '18 at 08:25
This is called the _heredoc format_ which tells _cat_ to read from the stdin stream until the specified _end is of stream marker is found. In our case the single word "EOF". @kennytm summarized it very nicely: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2500451/1177024 – Michael Kargl Nov 13 '18 at 12:12
Worked as expected. I added a back slash to `cat <<\EOF >>~/.bashrc` to avoid variable substitution as explained [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22697688/how-to-cat-eof-a-file-containing-code#answer-22698106) – Nov 13 '18 at 17:57

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 13 '18 at 12:54

0

you can use brackets, to avoid copying the redirection.

{
   echo … &&
   echo … &&
   echo …
} >> ~/.bashrc

Note: the / is never needed after a &&.

answered Nov 13 '18 at 12:54

ctrl-alt-delor

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Better way of piping string into bashrc

2 Answers2