Background

I have a habit of creating new user profiles on my mac that serves different needs (ie recruiting, software development etc). I'm always thinking of ways to make creating a new user less expensive, one is saving all sorts of setting files and saving them in dropbox (ie alfred settings, slate settings, bash_profile, vimrc etc etc).

I also have many settings that I have to issue mac commands for (like this one):

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Documents/Screenshots   
killall SystemUIServer

How can I save these in a "dot file", and simply have the system read them on load (ie like ~/.bash_profile)?

Solution 1:

• create a bash script for all the config commands, e.g.

  #!/bin/bash
  
  defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Documents/Screenshots   
  killall SystemUIServer
  

• store it in /usr/local/bin under whatever name you like

• run it once for each new account

Solution 2:

The easiest thing is probably to create an app bundle that executes any number of arbitrary things, then add it to your login items under System Preferences -> Users and Groups -> Login Items.

I'd recommend using AppleScript to do be the middleman. Create a new Applescript to run your task, then go to File -> Export... and choose Application.

Alternatively you can just add it to your ~/.bash_profile if you'd like. There's a possibility this isn't configure to run on startup because macOS; if that's the case, just add it to your ~/.bashrc.