undoing changes to bashrc from terminal

Question

Unfortunately I just overwrote my .bashrc with

echo \"command\" > ~/.bashrc

as opposed to append

Answer 1

For the future you may consider using a version control system such as git or hg in order to save previous versions of files such as ~/.bashrc. Then if you happen to do a > rather than >> in the future you should be able to recover the file back to the point the last time you commited it to the version control.

An example of how to set this up for git would be:

cd ~
git init
git add ~/.bashrc
git commit -m "Added .bashrc to version control"
# Time goes by...
echo "export FOO=bar" >> ~/.bashrc # Added a new line
git commit -am "Added FOO to .bashrc"
# Time goes by...
echo "export SHEEP=lambs" > ~/.bashrc # Eeek! We've overwritten our file
# Version control to the rescue
git checkout ~/.bashrc # file is restored
echo "export SHEEP=lambs" >> ~/.bashrc # Done correctly this time!
git commit -am "Added SHEEP to .bashrc"