How to "source" ~/.bashrc automatically once it has been edited?

Question

I would like to create an alias that does the following:

• Opens TextMate with ~/.bashrc and allows me to edit it
• Once I close TextMate, "sources" ~/.bashrc (so if I add a new alias, for example, it will be available immediately)

I tried the following:

alias b="/usr/bin/mate -w ~/.bashrc; source ~/.bashrc"

but it doesn't work: when I close TextMate, the shell doesn't return.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I hesitate to suggest it, but if this is a feature you really want, you can make something similar happen by setting the PROMPT_COMMAND variable to something clever.

PROMPT_COMMAND is run every time the shell shows the shell prompt So, if you're okay with the shells updating only after you hit Enter or execute a command, this should nearly do it.

Put export PROMPT_COMMAND="source ~/.bashrc" into your ~/.bashrc file. Re-source it into whichever shell sessions you want the automatically updating behavior to work in.

This is wasteful -- it re-sources the file with every prompt. If you can get your editor to leave the old version in a specific file, say ~/.bashrc~ (where the first ~ means your home directory and the last ~ is just a ~, a common choice for backup filenames) then you could do something more like (untested):

export PROMPT_COMMAND="[ ~/.bashrc -nt ~/.bashrc~ ] && touch ~/.bashrc~ && source ~/.bashrc "

then it would stat(2) the two files on every run, check which one is newer, and re-source only if the ~/.bashrc is newer than its backup. The touch command is in there to make the backup look newer and fail the test again.