Here's a guide for newbies on how to customize bash.

- You can set you're terminal in emacs/vi mode, which means you will have emacs/vi controls in when typing commands

"set -o vi/emacs"

- You can set aliases in .bashrc

"alias test='ls -all'" now test is equal to ls -all

- You can also edit /etc/profile and type any program you would like to execute on bash startup.

- You can modify the PS1 variable in .bashrc, which is resposible for the

[hostname@domain dir]$

Here is an example of my PS1:

PS1='\[\033[1m\]\[\033[40m\]\[\033[31m\][\[\033[30m\]\[\033[49m\]\u@nix.net \[\033[37m \]\[\033[3 m\]\w\[\03 3[23m\]\[\ 033[40m\]\ [\033[31m\ ]]\[\033[3 6m\]\[\033 [40m\]$\[\033[33m\]\[\033[49m\] \[\033[40m\]'

For further explanations on PS1 see:

http://tinyurl.com/hmgn4





[This message has been edited by login (edited 04-02-2007).]

Here's a cool trick I learned the other day:

john@lenin:/data/test$ ls -al

total 8

drwxr-xr-x 2 john john 4096 2007-04-01 19:14 .

drwxr-xr-x 19 john root 4096 2007-04-01 19:13 ..

-rw-r--r-- 1 john john 0 2007-04-01 19:14 foo

john@lenin:/data/test$ !ls

ls -al

total 8

drwxr-xr-x 2 john john 4096 2007-04-01 19:14 .

drwxr-xr-x 19 john root 4096 2007-04-01 19:13 ..

-rw-r--r-- 1 john john 0 2007-04-01 19:14 foo

john@lenin:/data/test$

Basically, if you type !command, command is called with the same arguments that were used the last time you used said command. This is quite useful with commands such as ssh, for example.

This is probably better done using ~/.bash_profile

Also, ~/.bashrc is BASH Run Control, where you would execute startup commands when the shell is invoked for your user, rather than ~/.bash_profile, where you would set say, environment variables or such and export them. It doesn't make a big difference where you do these things depending on the nature of what it is you are trying to accomplish, but I just wanted to clarify that.

For example, I set several variables within ~/.bash_profile for my user which are CVS_RSH and CVSROOT since I connect to the Fedora CVS development server to checkout CVS trees.

It beats having to export these variables everytime I login.

I thought setting variables in .bash_profile was a security risk.

May be i'm wrong though.

Do you have some document pertaining to this?

I'm not sure how it could be a security risk.

If someone managed to get access to you're account and you su to root. You use a variable you've settup in you're local .bash_profile

But the hacker has changed it to point to some malicious code.

I'm not sure if you can still use that variable once you've su'ed.

[This message has been edited by login (edited 04-02-2007).]

Using su without --login will still retain the environment variables from your user's shell, this is true, now what "malicious code" are you talking about setting a variable to?

Example:

Setting the SHELL to /home/username/similartobashwithmaliciouscode

Dude, your shell is specified in /etc/passwd not via the $SHELL environment variable.

I must be very bored.

I also forgot about /etc/shells.

Anyway, that was just an example.