Sharing shell settings between Macs

This one is a bit crazy, so be careful. Read on if you fall into most of these categories:

• You have multiple Macs

• You frequently make changes to .bash_profile (or equivalent)

• You’d love to have your shell history shared between machines for tab completion

• You have an iCloud account shared on all your Macs

• You like to live a little dangerously

Iʼve been running this way over 10 years and have never run into problems, other than syncing sometimes being sluggish. However, most of the time it’s so fast that it’s amazing.

If your shell files get messed up during the setup and you can’t get to a command prompt, you can do the following:

• Launch Terminal

• Go to Preferences -> General

• Change the “Shells open with”setting to specify a complete path.

• Use a different shell path like /bin/tcsh or /bin/zsh.

• Then, fix the problem if you know what it is or restore your shell files from backup

Since anyone wanting to try this is probably super advanced, I will provide a terse description rather than a beginner’s gu…