December 2003
Beginner to intermediate
192 pages
5h 7m
English
Content preview from Learning Unix for Mac OS X PantherBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Customizing Your Shell Environment
The Unix shell reads a number of configuration files when it starts up. These configuration files are really shell programs, so they are extraordinarily powerful. Shell programming is beyond the scope of this book. For more detail, see Cameron Newham and Bill Rosenblatts’ book Learning the bash Shell (O’Reilly) or Dave Taylors’ Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (NoStarch). Because Unix is a multiuser system, there are two possible locations for the configuration files: one applies to all users of the system and another to each individual user.
The system-wide setup files that are read by bash, the default shell for Mac OS X, are found in /etc (profile and bashrc). You only have permission to change these system-wide files if you use sudo (see Section 3.3 in Chapter 3). However, you can create another file called .profile in your home directory that will add additional commands to be executed whenever you start a new Terminal window. (If you configure Terminal to use another shell, such as the Bourne shell, the C shell, or the Z shell, you’ll need to set up different configuration files. See the manpage for the appropriate shell for details.)
The system-wide setup files are read first, then the user-specific ones, so commands in your .profile file can override those in the system-wide files. The system-wide profile and bashrc files are succinct:
$ cat /etc/profile # System-wide .profile for sh(1) PATH="/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin" export PATH [ -r ...Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.