
234
|
Chapter 9, Administration and Automation
#76 Take Control of New User Setups
HACK
Improve What Is Already There
If you have fine-tuned your personal settings in one or more of these files
and believe others would benefit from changes you make for your own per-
sonal preferences, edit the existing /etc/skel to use default settings taken from
your personal settings. Take a look at “Colorize Files in Your Pager”
[Hack
#15]
. This particular hack redefines some command aliases so that you can
see a color listing of files in your pager. All it takes is to replace the existing
alias definitions (usually found in .bashrc) to read something more like this:
alias ls="ls --color"
alias less="less -R"
Make those changes in the /etc/skel/.bashrc file, and all new users will bene-
fit from the hack, assuming your users are as pleased with the idea as you
are.
Create Application Defaults
The /etc/skel directory is also an ideal place to put customizations for indi-
vidual programs, as long as those configuration files do not include user-
names or paths to user directories. It’s quite easy to find out if a file or
directory has hardcoded references to a username or user directory. For
example, assuming your username is
carlotta, try this command in your
home directory:
$ grep -r carlotta .kde
You might be shocked at how many configuration files, among other things,
show up with the username hardcoded. You can’t