Found in my .bashrc
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, 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 and it had three handy little aliases installed5:
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’↩
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Gucis! Ah the memories!
* now reads the rest of the post …
May 25th, 2009 at 3:17 am
ah the student number, my primary form of ID for so long it’s impossible to forget. Of course it helped that mine was so simple :)
Interestingly I don’t use ll for “ls -al”, I use la. Probably because Debian was my first distro, and to this day they have an “la” definition (although it doesn’t include -l).
Those aliases and PS1 value look like the old defaults on most systems (or maybe it was just Debian). They have been tweaked a bit over the years but if you check out /etc/skel/.bashrc you can see that not much has changed!
PS1=’${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ ‘