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

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"?