How to Create a Permanent Alias in Mac OS X Lion Terminal?

Question

I've googled the heck out of this. The typical methods of adding the alias to ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile just aren't working for me. Help please? Thanks!

Here's my current ~/.bash_profile

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then . ~/.bashrc; fi

export PATH="$HOME/bin:${PATH}"

source ~/.bashrc

alias jm.mobi="ssh [email protected]"

# put this at the very end of your bash file
[[ -s "/usr/local/rvm/bin/rvm" ]] && . "/usr/local/rvm/bin/rvm" # This loads RVM into a    shell session.

Also, when I source ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile it logs me out of root, strange ...

Solution

Without more details of what's going wrong it's hard to tell for sure, but I see three suspicious things off the top of my head:

1. You source ~/.bashrc twice (once with ., then again with source). Once really should be enough.

2. In general, I'd recommend setting aliases in .bashrc (and then sourcing it (once) from .bash_profile). That way, the aliases are available in both login shells and subshells. Creating an alias in .bash_profile means it'll only be available in login shells.

3. Isn't /usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm the appropriate file to set up rvm definitions?

Comments

[Waley Chen]

stackoverflow.com/questions/2309103/… - The second comment in the last answer in the thread helped me figure out what's going on/what's being load and what not.