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Is there a way to completely restart Bash and reload .bashrc and .profile and the like? I'd like to make sure my changes worked out properly after editing these files.

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4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Have it replace itself with itself.

exec bash -l

Note that this won't affect things such as the cwd or exported variables.

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Nice, but I'd especially like to do this in order to check and see if my PATH is being set as I want or my PS1, etc. – TK Kocheran Oct 16 '11 at 22:35
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Take out the exec and you get a shell that sources the files that you want. Then just exit when you are done checking. – Arcege Oct 17 '11 at 0:20
@TK: Any variables you assign will take precedence over the ones left over from the previous shell. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Oct 17 '11 at 3:23
So this will work for changing my Bash prompt? Ie, it'll reload my bash prompt each time I run it? – TK Kocheran Oct 17 '11 at 3:35
As long as you're setting $PS1 in bash's startup files, yes. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Oct 17 '11 at 3:40
up vote 7 down vote

I urgently suggest to log in on a separate window/screen. This way you still have a working session if something goes wrong with your changes to startup files. Also you are sure to have a clean environment.

Reason: I saw too many people locking themselves out of a system because of a simple typo in their .profile (or such).

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+10, a clean shell where you can change edits is essential. – Sardathrion Oct 17 '11 at 13:17
I'm in a DE, so it shouldn't be so bad, Bauhaus yes, be careful. – TK Kocheran Oct 17 '11 at 17:12
up vote 2 down vote 
su -l yourOwnUserName

Will open a fresh shell for yourOwnUserName user with all the settings re-loaded. This is shell-independent, as it refers to system settings, not your specific shell. It also loads some system-wide settings that bash -l does not (like user groups).

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up vote 1 down vote

If your goal is simply to read the modified files again, you don't have to restart it. You can simply source it.

source filename

or 

. filename # notice the dot

Note that this won't give you a "clean state" in a sense that it won't unset any set variables or defined functions...

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