Source new .bashrc in all open terminals

bashbashrcterminal

I find myself having many terminals open at once all the time. When I update my .bashrc, I have to go to each terminal and execute

. .bashrc

to source the terminal with the new .bashrc.

This is kind of a pain and also time consuming. I was wondering if there is a way of sourcing all open terminals with the new .bashrc file without going to each one or logging out and starting over?

Best Answer

terdon's approach works well under the right circumstances, but if, e.g., .bashrc appends to the PATH variable, it will cause errors rather quickly.

Instead of simply resourcing the file, you could check its modification time first and compare it to the mtime of the last sourced version.

To do so, append this to ~/.bashrc:

Linux

bashrc_sourced=$(stat -c %Y ~/.bashrc)

PROMPT_COMMAND='
    test $(stat -c %Y ~/.bashrc) -ne $bashrc_sourced && source ~/.bashrc
'

OS X and BSD

bashrc_sourced=$(stat -f %m ~/.bashrc)

PROMPT_COMMAND='
    test $(stat -f %m ~/.bashrc) -ne $bashrc_sourced && source ~/.bashrc
'

Then, resource it manually one final time.

Related Solutions

How to change background/foreground color on “all” existing terminals

You can redirect the output of the setterm command to the device file of the terminal.

for i in {0..3}; do setterm -term linux -back blue -fore white -clear > /dev/pts/$i; done

Linux Bash – Why .bashrc is Read During Noninteractive SSH Commands

From bash man page:

Bash attempts to determine when it is being run with its standard input
connected to a a network  con‐nection,  as  if  by  the remote shell daemon,
usually rshd, or the secure shell daemon sshd.  If bash
determines it is being run in this fashion, it reads and executes commands
from  ~/.bashrc,  if  that file  exists and is readable.

I.e. ~/.bashrc will get run when you invoke it via ssh, regardless of whether you have a tty or not.

If you only want your .bashrc to run when you are interactive, try this at the top:

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[[ "$-" != *i* ]] && return

If that doesn't work, try this:

[ -z "$PS1" ] && return