Shell Programming and Scripting

i have been interacting a little with the forum in the last couple of days and to tell the truth I have learnt quite a bit from some of the posts that I have read accessed or posted.. from some of the books that I have read I have a pretty good idea about shells, profile files, .bashrc, etc, etc but little experience considering it has only been precisely one year since I started out on my unix\/linux system ( there is so much to learn its difficult to narrow down the subject of choice to one or two without missing something important somewhere else.).. any way as I said I have found the exact syntax to many of the unix subject matters outlined in books for beginners and intermediates (and beyond!) in the forum and was wandering if anyone with some expertise on the matter could give a brief description on how to use the bash files..
to be more precise..
1) how do I get aliases to work in .bashrc ( i tried to no avail!)
2) how do I go about inserting scripts into a bash login file (for ex and which file is it)..
thanx in advance moxxx68

In response to question 1. A simple alias can be formed thusly

Code:

alias lla='ls -la'

within .bashrc. If you want fancy stuff, consider functions. See this thread for some information on parameters within functions.

For Q2, if you want to source other scripts at login, place a line such as

Code:

. /path/to/my/script

within .bash_login. You can do similar stuff with .bash_logout to execute commands and scripts at logout.

You can see my .kshrc file file which is the Korn shells equivalent of .bashrc and might give you some ideas.

Cheers
ZB

I appreciate the info I will look at the link that you gave in greater detail it looks quite benefitial to answering most my question about the 2 example questions I gave.. I have just one more question. I just tried inserting a small login script in the .bash_profile (seems stupid) but from what your are saying there is a bash login file and its not the .bash_profile file I gather.. if not what is it called ... .bash_logout???? where can I find it..
char moxxx68

You can have .profile, .bash_login or .bash_profile.

From the bash manpage

Code:

it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile,
in  that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that
exists and is readable.

If ~/.bash_logout doesn't exist, just create it.

Cheers
ZB

thanx for the update....!
this is a much needed answer since I have not been able to access the library for a while now due to a move in location.. .(my old college library)
the basic county libaries don't carry very much unix\/linux info... so I am left without the advantage I had last year. I greatly appreaciate your time..
thanx moxxx68