Chapter 20. bash: The Bourne-Again Shell
bash
is
the GNU version of the standard Bourne shell—the original Unix
shell—and incorporates many popular features from other shells
such as csh
, tcsh
, and the
Korn shell (ksh
). tcsh
,
which is described in the following chapter, offers many of the
features in this chapter, and is also available on most distributions
of Linux. However, bash
is the default user
shell for Mac OS X Panther.
If executed as part of the user’s login,
bash
starts by executing any commands found in
/etc/profile
. It executes the commands found in
~/.bash_profile,
~/.bash_login, or
~/.profile (searching for each file only if the
previous file is not found).
In addition, every time it starts (as a subshell or a login shell),
bash
looks for a file named
~/.bashrc. Many system administration utilities
create a small ~/.bashrc automatically, and many
users create quite large startup files. Any commands that can be
executed from the shell can be included. Here’s a
small sample file:
# Set bash variable to keep 50 commands in history. HSTSIZE=50 # # Set prompt to show current working directory and history number of # command. PS1='\w: Command \!$ ' # # Set path to search for commands in my directories, then standard ones. PATH=~/bin:~/scripts:$PATH # # Keep group and others from writing my newly created files. umask 022 # # Show color-coded file types. alias ls='ls --color=yes' # # Make executable and .o files ugly yellow so I can find and delete them. export LS_COLORS="ex=43:*.o=43" ...
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