Four out of five UNIX users prefer the Bash shell to other
leading brands. You can download version 2.05, compiled for OS X, here.
The instructions on how to install it are included in the file bash-osx.html(also included in the download). If you want the source code,
you can get it here.
Bash is brought to you by The Free Software
Foundation (yay!). As of 05-16-01, I've compiled Bash 2.05 and revised
the installation to make it easy to do on OSX.
Note: the included "profile", which is
installed in /etc, will overwrite any previous version you might have
(if you have installed a previous version of Bash), so please back it
up first. Also, the included "profile" is provided as a starting
point only - you should edit it to suit your needs. In particular, it
assumes that you will be using the color version of "ls", however
my installer does not install this. If you wish to use it, follow
the install instructions in my Tip 2. If you are
not going to install the color version of ls, then you'll need to comment
out the line in /etc/profile which reads alias ls='/bin/ls2 --color
-a'
If you're a more experienced Unix user, you might want to
use Fink to
install Bash instead. Fink
can install many Darwin pakages, including Bash, and I highly recommend
it.
The Bash shell has some advantages over the tcsh which is
supplied as standard on OS X PB, and is standard on most Linux systems,
making it very widespread. If you use a shell a lot, it is worth it to
learn some of its options, such as automatic command completion, searching
and editing the history of commands, etc. Check the Bash
info page, and the online
documentation. The O'Reilly
book is also quite good.
Using the Bash shell? Press ESC twice (or press TAB) to
autocomplete commands. For example, to cd to a directory named xyz.1-2-3,
type cd xy ESC ESC (xy must be unique - type as many letters
as required to be unique). To get the last command argument, type ESC
. (that's a period). For example, cd xyz, ls ESC .
To open any program from the shell, simply type openpath_to_program/name_of_program. Try open . (that's a period)
to open the current folder in the Finder. For more Terminal tips, click
here.
