[caymanjim]

> When I see tutorials that tell me to run `. ~/.bashrc` after adding something to my bashrc, I run `exec bash` instead.

This is a bad idea. If there are any errors in your .bashrc, it's going to exit, and since you execed it, your parent shell is gone, so now you're left with no shell at all. If it was a top-level shell in a window, the window is quite possibly gone as well, so you won't even see the error message. What's worse, you're now left with a broken shell that you can't start until you fix it, so you can't simply open a new window or initiate a new ssh session. There are solutions to get a new shell without reading the defective .bashrc, but most people have no idea how to do that and would be locked out.