re-use '~/.profile` for Fish?

(I'm talking about the shell Fish, esp. Fish's Fish.)

For Bash/ZSH, I had ~/.profile with some exports, aliases and other stuff.

I don't want to have a separate config for environment variables for Fish, I want to re-use my ~/.profile. How?

In The FAQ, it is stated that I can at least import those via /usr/local/share/fish/tools/import_bash_settings.py, however I don't really like running that for each Fish-instance.

10 Answers

You can use bash to parse /etc/profile and ~/.profile, and then start fish.

1. Create /usr/local/bin/fishlogin with contents

    #!/bin/bash -l exec -l fish "$@"

2. Make it executable

    sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/fishlogin

3. Check that it works by running fishlogin and checking that you end up in a Fish shell. Press Control+D to exit the Fish shell.

4. Add it to /etc/shells

    echo /usr/local/bin/fishlogin | sudo tee -a /etc/shells

5. Set it as your default shell.

   Under Linux:

    sudo usermod -s /usr/local/bin/fishlogin $USER

   Under macOS:

    chsh -s /usr/local/fishlogin $USER

13

For a much cleaner solution, you can use the foreign env plugin:

fenv source ~/.profile

3

My current solution (see here for a maybe more recent version):

egrep "^export " ~/.profile | while read e set var (echo $e | sed -E "s/^export ([A-Z_]+)=(.*)\$/\1/") set value (echo $e | sed -E "s/^export ([A-Z_]+)=(.*)\$/\2/") # remove surrounding quotes if existing set value (echo $value | sed -E "s/^\"(.*)\"\$/\1/") if test $var = "PATH" # replace ":" by spaces. this is how PATH looks for Fish set value (echo $value | sed -E "s/:/ /g") # use eval because we need to expand the value eval set -xg $var $value continue end # evaluate variables. we can use eval because we most likely just used "$var" set value (eval echo $value) set -xg $var $value
end

2

I tried sourcing .profile on fish startup and it worked like a charm for me.

just do :

echo 'source ~/.profile;clear;' > ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Restart terminal or iterm2, test an alias from .profile to test.

Note : Won't work with more complex .profile files that use syntax not available in fish - credit @erb

3

You can use bass, a plugin to execute bash commands in fish.

1. Install bass.

   $ git clone
   $ cd bass
   $ make install

2. And then, just put this in your config.fish:

   bass source ~/.profile

5

Install dash and add this line to your config.fish:

env -i HOME=$HOME dash -l -c 'export -p' | sed -e "/PATH/s/'//g;/PATH/s/:/ /g;s/=/ /;s/^export/set -x/" | source

1

You can't. fish's syntax is too different from Bourne shell (/bin/sh) syntax. This is the same reason you can't use .profile with other non-Bourne-derived shells, such as csh and tcsh.

1

If your distribution uses PAM, you could set your environment variables in your ~/.pam_environment file.

You can start Fish from Bash. If you do that, Fish will inherit all environment variables (export FOO=bar) from Bash. At this point, Bash will have already read your .profile (or the like).

bash-3.2$ export TEST="test"
bash-3.2$ fish
cmey@MBP ~> echo $TEST
test

I managed to solve this by adding the following to my ~/.bashrc file:

if [ $SHLVL -lt 2 ]; then fish; exit; fi

This way one does not have to type exit twice when exiting the fish subshell. Bash subshells inside the fish subshell are not affected.

0

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Sign up using Google Sign up using Facebook Sign up using Email and Password Submit

Post as a guest

Post Your Answer Discard

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy