I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but now that I’m working on lots of identical systems, I finally have checked my bashrc into source control. Over the past couple years, I’ve accrued some useful tricks. My number one useful alias is virc, which I’ve now adapted to scm form:

alias virc='svn update; vi ~/.bashrc; source ~/.bashrc; svn ci ~/.bashrc -m "virc bashrc auto-update"'

This is, I think the secret to being sure that you put that tricky 20 command pipe, or the path that you type over and over again. With the virc, I’m 4-letters away from pasting that and having it immediately available at the prompt. The scm calls make sure that I’m editing the latest version and that I check it right in.

A couple bits of laziness philosophy:

• single letters – I used to have things like cdwww, but my laziness has progressed to new levels, so now I alias single letters to changing folders. Typically they go like this:
  

  export w='/var/www'
alias u="cdd $u"

  The cdd is an alias I have to pushd. I also have some things bound to relative paths. For example, I have h bound to htdocs, so I can type w to get to my web folder, and either h to get to the htdocs or l to get to the lib folder.

hostnames – Same premise as above but for SSHing. I used to have things like sshrf, but now I do whatever’s shorter (ssh[shortcut] or [hostname])

• tl – Simple shortcuts, like in this case for tailing logs, are great for chaining together. If you’re doing a lot of tl | grep ‘foo’, you’ll probably save as much time over the years as that mega-command you create that you don’t use all that often
• multiple hosts – here’s what I use to create host specific branches (I probalby will need to change to globbing or regex matching)
  

  if [ `hostname` == "muffins" ]; then
export svn='file:///var/svn'

fi

• multiple files – for stuff that I don’t want check in, I have a separate file now:
  

  if [ -f ~/.mybashrc ]; then
source ~/.mybashrc
fi

  The multi-file loading can be nested in the multi-host conditionals for loading files for specific hosts.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any good shell-tip sharing sites, but it would be interesting. — I got sidetracked here, and it’s late, so maybe to be continued.