bash

.bash_profile — all the config

bash reads .bash_profile for login shells. Everything lives here: prompt, history, options, locale, colours, aliases, completion.

Prompt

If Starship is installed, it’s used — same prompt as zsh.

Otherwise a simple fallback prompt is used (handy on minimal servers):

~/projects/dotfiles (main) $

• Current folder in blue, git branch in yellow.
• $ is green for normal users, red for root — a reminder you have full power.
• Blank lines above and below make it easy to see where command output starts and ends.

History

Setting	Effect
HISTTIMEFORMAT="%c "	history shows when each command ran
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth	skip duplicates and commands starting with a space
HISTSIZE=1000, HISTFILESIZE=2000	commands kept in memory / on disk
histappend	add to the history file instead of overwriting it

Options (shopt)

Option	Effect
nocaseglob	*.JPG also matches photo.jpg
cdspell	fixes small typos in cd paths (cd /ect → /etc)
checkwinsize	keeps $LINES / $COLUMNS right after resizing the window

Also in .bash_profile

• Locale — same logic as zsh
• CLICOLOR=1 — coloured ls on macOS
• lesspipe and dircolors
• Loads ~/.aliases, ~/.aliases.local, ~/.functions, ~/.functions.local
• bash-completion — Tab-completes git branches, apt packages, ssh hosts and more. Needs the bash-completion package (the installer adds it on Linux).
• ~/bin and ~/.local/bin added to PATH if they exist. Ubuntu does this in ~/.profile, but bash stops reading ~/.profile once ~/.bash_profile exists.
• Android SDK folders added to PATH ($HOME/Android/Sdk/…), only when that folder exists.
• ~/.zsh_secrets loaded, so bash gets your API keys too. See Local files.
• ~/.bash_profile.local, loaded last, for machine-specific lines — see Local files.

.bashrc

.bashrc just points to .bash_profile. Why it’s needed: new terminal tabs on Linux and docker exec … bash are non-login shells. They read ~/.bashrc, not ~/.bash_profile. Without a .bashrc they’d get no aliases or prompt.

This repo’s .bashrc does two things:

[[ $- != *i* ]] && return                              # 1. stop if not interactive
[ -f "$HOME/.bash_profile" ] && . "$HOME/.bash_profile" # 2. load the real config

1. $- holds the shell’s option letters; i means interactive. bash also reads .bashrc for commands run over SSH — including scp and rsync. If the profile printed anything there, it would corrupt the file transfer. So non-interactive shells stop immediately.
2. Interactive shells load .bash_profile.

There’s no double-loading: login shells read .bash_profile and skip .bashrc (as long as .bash_profile never loads .bashrc).

Your old .bashrc is replaced

Ubuntu’s default ~/.bashrc sets up a few things. The ones that matter are ported into .bash_profile (see Colours & Ubuntu defaults), but anything you added to your own .bashrc is only in the backup, ~/.bashrc.bak.<timestamp>. Move what you need into ~/.aliases.local or ~/.functions.local.

.inputrc — Tab completion behaviour

.inputrc configures readline, the library bash uses for editing the command line. (Other programs using readline — python, psql — pick it up too.)

Setting	Effect
completion-ignore-case on	Tab completes doc → Documents
show-all-if-ambiguous on	show all matches on the first Tab, not the second