- Introduction
- All Those Dot Files
- Environment Variables
- Aliases
- Functions
- Options
- Start-up Commands
- The Command Lne
- Resources
- Conclusion
Questions regarding this article should be directed to the author at paul.dunne@mailroom.com
While the rest of the world points and clicks in a scary little world of icons, all alike, we in the world of Unix get to use our good old CLI, or command line interface. One big reason why the CLI has remained so prevaisive in Unix environments is that it is actually damn good. Modern Unix shells are stable and powerful. This article looks at some methods to increase the power and usableness of your shell.
Introduction
So, I will be looking at how to get more out of your shell. I personally use a version of the Korn shell, pdksh, but most of what I say will be applicable to bash; where it isn't, I'll tell you so. As Zsh is mostly compatible with ksh, most of the article is useful for that as well. I will not bother with the C shell, on the grounds that I neither use it nor like it, and that it is so different as to be really the subjet of a seperate article. This article is not a shell tutorial for novices; it will presume that you know how to run commands, what wildcards are, and such stuff. What I will be doing is taking a look at some things that a lot of regular shell users don't realise can be done.