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

use jedi mind tricks

[nocomment]

I'd also recomend creating a file called 'README.EXE' and putting a copy in their homedir and a copy somewhere on PATH. chmod +x and have the file jsut contain
#!/bin/bash

echo"tutorial blah blah blah
ls does blah blah blah
to find more info use man blah blah blah

I think you get the idea.

most newb are familiar with the idea that .exe means something you can run, and therefore the idea of typing 'README.EXE' to view the howto would not be all that alien to them.

Re:use jedi mind tricks

[nocomment]

You'd think so wouldn't you. When i first saw that done I thought it looked weird too. A company I used to work for gave shell accounts to any technical employee that wanted one on their 'testing' server. Most people had never learned linux before and therefore didn't really know what to do. The real admin of the server did that, and the newbs ate it up. I initially thought it was a bad idea because it just showed the windows people that .exe's ran on linux (that was my thought anyway) but it proved to be sucessful.

*nix newbs in our department were soon using that server for all manner of testing.

The company by the way was mindspring, it's not like it was some podunk place. :-)

Trust me, it's not nonsense, it actually works very well indeed.

Re:$PS1

[fm6]

We can argue about what that entails...

Can and will.

A lot of the stuff that traditionally goes in shell prompts is outdated or inappropriate for newbies. If you're using using the shell in a terminal window (as almost everybody does these days, especially newbies), you don't need email notification, time, CPU load, and a lot of other crap you can have in a GUI window. The name of the machine you're on is helpful is you're access a lot of different machines -- but most newbies won't do that. (Let's all sing the Telnet Song!) I like to have the command history number in my prompt, since that makes it easier to repeat a command that hasn't scrolled off the top of the screen yet. Then again, that's obsolete too, since any decent shell has lets you uparrow back to previous commands.

I used to have something to indicate my shell depth, so I wouldn't forget that I'd shelled out of another program. But I stopped shelling out when job control was invented -- not to mention Xterm windows.

I guess there's not a lot worth putting in the prompt any more. And what you do put should mostly be embedded in an escape string that puts it in the Xterm window. No, wait a minute, that's obsolete too -- most shells now let you define a hook -- an alias or a script -- that's run before each prompt. Makes more sense to put complicated commands there.

So probably you should just set the prompt to "% " and forget about it.

Re:For the old farts familiar with DOS

[dreamer-of-rules]

even better, alias dos commands to mini-helps.

> copy old.txt new.txt
Try using 'cp <options> <source> <target>'. For example:
cp old.txt new.txt
Type 'man cp' for more help.

Consider AT, CHKDSK, CMD, COPY, DATE?, DEL, DIR, ECHO, EDIT, FC, MKDIR or MD, MOVE, RD, RENAME?, TIME?, XCOPY.

Re:No Cheat sheet - alias the commands!

[AvitarX]

I would actually recomend aliasing the DOS commands to echo text similar to this:

dir is a DOS command, the most similar command in Linux is ls

type ls man ls for directions.

Most common usage is "ls -al"

or something to that effect. Also I would aliad ls to ls -F --color=auto (most distros will reasonably alias the common commands though).

By listing the propper command instead of auto-subbing you can encourage people to learn more about the commands (anybody using the command prompt will probably be at the level it will benefit them) and you can put in warnings about differences and better prepar the users for using other systems.