How to add persistent aliases on Kali Linux?

Question

I want to add persistent aliases on my Kali Linux installation and I can't get it to work. All answers I come across is to either add them to ~/.bashrc or to ~/bash_aliases (better and recommended), but these don't work for me. Each time I open a new terminal I have to type source ~/.bash_aliases to import them.

What I could be doing wrong?

Answer 1

I had to dig deeper and after a while I've discovered that in my home directory there are also the following files: .zshrc and .zshrc_history. After I've searched kali zshrc phrase this article pops out:

• https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/linux/kali-linux-20204-switches-the-default-shell-from-bash-to-zsh/

Apparently, since Kali Linux 2020.4 default shell is no longer bash, but zsh, so:

To add persistent aliases to the Kali Linux on release 2020.4 and newer, create ~/.shell_aliases file with your aliases content and reference it in the ~/.zshrc file as following:

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

Of course .shell_aliases is just an example, name it as you like as long as it doesn't conflict with anything and is correctly referenced in the ~/.zshrc.