What UNIX Shell Config Settings Work for Newbies?

Human_Diastrophism asks: "I'm involved in the roll-out of a new *x-based computing service in my previously Windows-centric organization. I want things set up so that newcomers will understand and like what they see. They should feel encouraged to behave appropriately, i.e. explore and extend the environment for themselves. We're talking about technically literate folk who are simply new to the demands and freedoms of the command line. No shell advocacy, please; it's going to be ksh or bash. What would you put in a .profile or .rc to make things work smoothly and give the user the capabilities and feedback they need? I'm thinking about stuff like 'stty erase ^H' and 'set -o emacs' so the edit keys work, and a compact but informative prompt. But what else would you put in? What would you leave out?"

Comments

Advice: Install Midnight Commander.

[Richard Steiner]

That way, the newbie can perform various filesystem commands or navigate the filesystem without having to know the actual commands at first, and they can slowly wean themselves off the filemanager if they want to later on (it does provide a command line).

Heck, I still use mc a lot after over 10 years using Linux. It's a very useful tool.

$PS1

[Otter]

Give them a helpful prompt! We can argue about what that entails (I recommend the path to PWD), but anything functional is better than "bash-2.03" or whatever it is now.

Re:$PS1

[gregmac]

I personally have settled on

PS1='[\u@\h:\w]\$ '

as my prompt. I work on many different systems (it's not uncommon for me to have 3 or 4 different sessions to different machines), so the hostname is almost a requirment. Username is a bit handy as well .. and it doesn't take up lots of space, so that's ok.

I also started using \w as my path (which prints the full path) simply because it would be too easy to lose track without it. When you come back to a window and it says "[root@ws005:bin]# " that doesn't really tell you a lot. I much prefer to see "[root@ws005:/usr/bin]#" or "[greg@hydrogen:/usr/local/someprog/bin]$".

Also handy is that the prompt is a valid source/target for scp or rsync.

Looks like no one has given you a real answer yet.

[rRaminrodt]

First off, create an alias for "help" that runs a shell script that runs a quick intro to the command line type tutorial, with scrolling, because you can't assume they will know better to pipe it into less.

If your users are familiar with dos you might also make "edit" an alias to "nano -w" or something similar. Forcing them to use vi right away might be offputting. (It was the first time I used unix)

Make sure rm is aliased to 'rm -i' if your distro doesn't do that already.

If you aren't using X, and everything is completely terminal based (or maybe even if it is). I'd make sure GNU screen is installed on those systems. Once your users get comfortable with the basics, screen adds some really nice features to the mix.

Decent prompt

[FooAtWFU]

Set up a decent prompt with a few nice colors, but don't overwhelm them with the date and time and fifty dozen different things. I reccomend:

PS1='\[\e[0;37m\]<\[\e[36m\]\u\[\e[0m\]@\[\e[0;33m \]\h\[\e[0m\] \[\e[1;36m\]\w\[\e[0m\e[1;34m\] \$\[\e[37m\]>\[\e[0m\] '

or something to that effect. Username@host, directory, all wrapped in a neat little angle-bracket configuration which will make anyone who's seen DOS a bit more comfortable with the system. If you have multiple hosts that they need to worry about, consider multiple colors for the hostnames.

Additionally, if there's any chance they'd use a command that checks the EDITOR or VISUAL or whatever environment variable, make sure that they do not launch vi. Give them something simple and easy like nano.

Consider the colors that 'ls' uses. Consider whether or not they'd be helped by a default like ls -p (print / and the like on the end of directories, @ for symlinks, etc.)

Vital thing

[bonkeroo buzzeye]

Some good stuff in previous posts about aliasing DOS commands to translation messages and commenting the .bashrc to be helpful.

Additionally, make *sure* their home, end, backspace, delete keys work properly. I'm not sure if we're talking pure command line or xterm (it's more an issue with some distros and xterms) but it's a hell of a lot to figure out when it's busted and a hell of a pain for a Windows user. It's not exclusively a shell issue but relates to the CLI experience.

And I'd recommend *not* aliasing 'rm' to 'rm -i' because they're going to get sloppy and be really annoyed when they move to a box that doesn't have that set up and wipe stuff out.

Set up their pager with something nice like 'export LESS="-eFMRXj12"' (well, it's nice to me).

Stuff like 'shopt -s checkwinsize cmdhist extglob histappend histverify [etc]' - histverify is cool for new people not popping off the wrong command by accident when they're playing with the cool history tricks.

Basically, keep it simple - avoid extremely dangerous things like giving them a fuzzy concept of 'rm' and enable not-particularly-dangerous things like 'histverify'. But make sure things like their keyboard and display work like they expect - most important thing. Then just give some hints and enable them to explore for themselves.

Re:No Cheat sheet - alias the commands!

[Haeleth]

you can make their lives so much simpler with several aliases:
[...]
alias rename="mv"

BAD idea. DOS commands are not just Unix commands with vowels in; they work differently.

For example, in DOS you can do

C:\> ren *.txt *.bak

and that is the equivalent of

$ for t in *.txt; do mv $t ${t/%txt/bak}; done

...except it's not case sensitive. Note that it is not equivalent to

$ mv *.txt *.bak

which is what your dangerous alias will make people expect.

ALSO: Create a couple of directories in everyone's home dir named, "MyDocuments", "MyPictures", etc., so people don't even have to learn how to create a directory.

What - not just alias md="mkdir"?