A Nice Shell Alias

You know how those installations always expect you to restart your shell for changes to take effect? closing / reopening and then cding to your current directory can feel tedious. Luckily, there’s a bash one-liner that restarts your shell, in window:

exec "$SHELL" -l

Dissection:

• exec – run command, replacing current process
• "$SHELL" – run the default shell.
• -l – Run it as a login shell.

I don’t know what the implications are of reloading a shell, but this does what I want right after I’m done installing something.

I’ve created an alias for this:

alias reload='exec "$SHELL" -l'

Pretty nifty.