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Profile Menus

Created: 2024-11-30

Related: um (personal command line documenation) and unix-shell-startup

One of my favorite ways of reminding myself what I can do on a remote machine is to write myself a little menu. It’s just some echo statements in the profile file (e.g. .bash_profile) that I see on startup.

Example:

$ cat .profile
echo "Welcome to the Foo Server"
echo "  foo    - start a foo tracker"
echo "  baz    - tails the baz log"
echo "  bonk   - bonks the boop file"
echo "See more notes in README.txt"

Often these are functions and aliases I’ve set up as handy shortcuts. Sometimes it’s just notes about where to find documentation or files.

It’s simple but extremely effective. Especially for machines I don’t log into very often.