.bashrc overwritten but still sourced — how can it be recovered?

Usually when I find a command I want to alias, I echo it to my .bashrc like so:

[up button pressed to last command, then line edited so that it reads]
$echo "command-i-just-did" >> ~/.bashrc

There may be a better way to do this. But anyway, just now I overwrote the entire .rc file by using a single chevron. However, since the .bashrc is still current, it’s still accepting my old aliases (for now of course). So is there a way to recover it?

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

• alias without parameter outputs the definitions of currently defined aliases.
• declare -f outputs the definitions of currently defined functions.
• export -p outputs the definitions of currently defined variables.

All those commands output definitions ready to be reused, you can redirect their outputs directly to a new ~/.bashrc.

All lists will contain a lot of elements defined elsewhere, for example /etc/profile and /etc/bash_completion. So you will have to clean up the list manually.

Method 2

typeset -f > .bashrc
should do it, providing all you had were aliases.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0