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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T14:44:29+00:00

I’ve written a simple bash script that adds an alias to my .bashrc automatically,

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I’ve written a simple bash script that adds an alias to my .bashrc automatically, and when it finishes, I would like it to source the .bashrc

It works fine as of now, for example

./addalias.sh ls 'ls -l'

properly appends ‘alias ls=’ls -l’ to the .bashrc, but doesn’t source it.

The code is as follows:

#!/bin/bash
FIRST=$1

SECOND=${2:-cd `pwd`}

echo alias $FIRST="'$SECOND'" >> /home/oscar/.bashrc
echo alias $FIRST="'$SECOND'"

source /home/oscar/.bashrc

That doesn’t work, nor does running an alias (“sourcebash”) to source the bash instead of the last line.

Any thoughts on how this could be fixed?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The shell that runs ‘addalias.sh’ does source the .bashrc file; it then exits. It does not and cannot affect the parent shell’s environment.

    You’d have to invoke the command as:

    source ./addalias.sh ls 'ls --color=auto'

    Or:

    . ./addalias.sh ls 'ls --color=auto'

    (Now fixed: And I’m not convinced that, even in a question, playing with sudo rm -fr /* is remotely sensible. There’s too much risk of an idiot copying and not realizing.)

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