Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Terminal Shortcuts

The hints in this first batch are so safe and easy, you’ll wonder why anyone ever used “Terminal” and “intimidating” in the same sentence.

Note

Many of the hints in this chapter work only if your Mac OS X installation includes the software chunk known as the BSD Subsystem. The only reason you wouldn’t have that is if you explicitly turned its checkbox off when you installed Mac OS X.

Say Hello to Your New Shell: bash

In Panther, Apple changed how you approach the Unix part of the system. Previous versions of Mac OS X used the tcsh shell as the default shell (Sidebar 15.1); this was the shell that opened in Terminal the first time you launched it. With Panther, Apple changed to the bash shell.

Many Mac OS X veterans had become familiar with tcsh, and didn’t necessarily want things to change. Fortunately for them, if they upgraded a previous version of Mac OS X to Panther, they didn’t see a difference: Terminal still used the shell they had before. However, when you create a new account under Panther, or if you perform a clean install, Mac OS X automatically sets bash as your default shell.

Unless specified, all the hints in this and the following chapter assume that you’re using bash. If you are still using tcsh, or another shell, most of them will work just fine. However, you’ll need to use different configuration files for any hints that tell you to change settings, aliases, or variables.

If you need to know which files to edit, just type man shell (where shell is ...