Shell hacks: bash functions in files

Over the years I have collected a few shell snippets that have to be sourced or called as shell functions to work correctly. Having all these function definitions in a monolithic file sourced from my .bashrc isn’t cool, so for some time I’ve had the following in my .bashrc:

for i in $HOME/.lib.sh/* ; do
    source $i
done

This has at least one obvious downside. Each time I change a function definition I have to reload the function i each and every open shell if I want a consistent work environment. Today I came up with a nifty solution. Each file in ~/.lib.sh which previously contained a function definition isedited to only contain the function body. The I add the following new function called load_functions:

FUNCTIONS=$HOME/.lib.sh

eval $(
    find $FUNCTIONS -type f | \
        while read file ; do echo function $(basename $file)\(\) { source $file\; }\; ; done
)

For each file under ~/.lib.sh a new function is automatically defined which just sources the real file. This means I can edit the files without having to reload the function in every open shell. ~/.lib.sh/load_files itself is just sourced from my .bashrc.

One of my functions wraps the wonderful Perl5 module local::lib. This module makes it easy to manage multiple sandboxes with locally installed Perl modules. It works by setting a couple of environment variables including $PERL5LIB. Instead of using local::lib directly I used a function called perllibs:

# Defaults:
PERL_LOCAL_LIB="home"
DIR=$HOME/.perl

if [ -n "$1" ]; then
    PERL_LOCAL_LIB=$1
fi

export PERL_LOCAL_LIB

case $PERL_LOCAL_LIB in
    alpha)
        DIR=$HOME/projects/alpha/ ;;
    mercury)
        DIR=$HOME/subversion/mercury/perl ;;
    tmp)
        mkdir -p /tmp/makholm/perl
        DIR=/tmp/makholm/perl ;;
esac

eval $( perl -Mlocal::lib=$DIR )

Adding new projects to this list would be a hassle if I had to reload the file in multiple shells each time.