I’m playing with a couple of routers and comparing proprietary to open source on the same hardware. I miss my .bashrc functions and aliases… and compgen, tree, manpages, detailed help, etc; the little things that get annoying when they are missing.
I was thinking about trying to mount the embedded system on my workstation (while it is running?), but I’m not clear how this would work in practice with permissions, users, groups, root, etc. I’m curious how others do this kind of development/screwing around, or if this is a crazy idea.
I don’t recommend using the shell on routers for day-to-day management. Instead, consider using a network configuration management system like rconfig. I’ve used RANCID in the past, but I suspect something more modern like rconfig will be useful to you.