FreeBSD® Unleashed

Shell Initialization Files

It's now time to discuss how to customize your shell to do what you want. You can create aliases to simplify common commands, you can automatically execute certain programs every time you log in, you can set various environment variables to your taste, and much more. These tasks are handled in the shell initialization and configuration files, which exist both at the global and per-user levels.

Since tcsh and bash have completely different sets of configuration files, we will cover them both sequentially. FreeBSD includes system-wide and default per-user config files for both shells, so that you can switch from tcsh to bash on a system-wide basis if you really want to. This almost certainly won't be necessary.

Note