Bash sucks

I've recently been trying to clean up my home directory. I've switched from xinit to sx, I've switched from vim to neovim, and I've set the SSH_CONFIG variable to be XDG compliant.

The hardest change I've made (so far, I haven't ported firefox yet), was making bash XDG compliant. Bash puts all of its files into dotfiles in the home directory. I hate that. Going through possible solutions, I realized that the only feasible solution was to modify the bash source code directly.

This isn't really as daunting as it sounds, I use Gentoo Linux (I refuse to please Richard Stallman after seeing the code quality of the GNU project), so I have to compile every program I use from scratch. This means that I could just write a patch, and Gentoo would automatically apply it and compile it. I downloaded the bash source code, and the first thing I did was try to find where the path constants were stored.

Script started on 2022-03-07 16:50:09-06:00 [TERM="st-256color" TTY="/dev/pts/2" COLUMNS="191" LINES="55"]
nate@nates-gentoo-laptop ~/repos/bash-5.1.16 $ grep --color=none -rn "bashrc"

[83 lines of other files]

shell.c:1984:  /* We have decided that the ~/.bashrc file should not be executed
shell.c:2010:  bashrc_file = DEFAULT_BASHRC;
config-top.h:91:#define DEFAULT_BASHRC "~/.bashrc"
config-top.h:93:/* System-wide .bashrc file for interactive shells. */
config-top.h:94:/* #define SYS_BASHRC "/etc/bash.bashrc" */
config-top.h:104:   sshd and source the .bashrc if so (like the rshd behavior).  This checks
nate@nates-gentoo-laptop ~/repos/bash-5.1.16 $
exit

Script done on 2022-03-07 16:50:29-06:00 [COMMAND_EXIT_CODE="0"]

As it turns out, there's a very convenient config-top.h file that houses the default bashrc location! Good thing that the bash source code is reasonably written and that all other constant paths can be set similarly! Sorry, forgive my role playing. The bashrc file is important, but the ~/.bash_history file is created every time you try to close a shell, and not optional.

Grepping for .bash_history, you may miss this one line.

variables.c:600:      name = bash_tilde_expand (posixly_correct ? "~/.sh_history" : "~/.bash_history", 0);

The file path is directly embedded into the source code. It can't be configured from an external file, or even a header file containing centralized configuration options, but scattered around in C files. Well if the bashrc file is in this variables.c file, then clearly the bash_logout should also be here as well, right?

Script started on 2022-03-07 17:14:52-06:00 [TERM="st-256color" TTY="/dev/pts/2" COLUMNS="95" LINES="55"]
nate@nates-gentoo-laptop ~/repos/bash-5.1.16 $ grep -n bash_logout variables.c
nate@nates-gentoo-laptop ~/repos/bash-5.1.16 $
exit

Script done on 2022-03-07 17:15:02-06:00 [COMMAND_EXIT_CODE="1"]

Ah. Turns out that the bash_logout constant is stored in builtins/exit.def on line 164.

void
bash_logout ()
{
	/* Run our `~/.bash_logout' file if it exists, and this is a login shell. */
	if (login_shell && sourced_logout++ == 0 && subshell_environment == 0)
	{
		maybe_execute_file ("~/.bash_logout", 1);
		#ifdef SYS_BASH_LOGOUT
		maybe_execute_file (SYS_BASH_LOGOUT, 1);
		#endif
	}
}

Your eyes don't deceive you, that's C code written inside a .def file. This file will generate C code in a manner similar to yacc and bison. Why anybody in their right mind would ever add auto-generated code to a shell is beyond me, but the geniuses coding for GNU projects have decided that this is the most practical way to do this.

All of this pain and misery could have been avoided had there just been a --bashrc-file=[ARG] option in bash, or at least a header file that contained all these constants in a single place, but the geniuses at GNU have decided on taking the solution with the highest learning difficulty to efficiency ratio known to man.