Personal Shell

One way to reduce the anxiety of using the command line is to gain as much control over the situation as possible. Bash, the default shell in most GNU/Linux distributions, is no exception. If you know how to customize Bash, you should start to lose the sense of trauma (no doubt induced by an exposure to DOS early in your computing life) that seizes you when the idea of using a command line is raised.

Of course, many customizations are interesting only if you are a developer. Frankly, listing every possible option would require a column five or six times the length of this one. Still, the examples below can be interesting to users at any level and give some sense of the possibilities. They range from creating short names for commands and changing default permissions to customizing the look and feel of the command prompt and the behavior of the Bash history.

The Files Involved

Before you begin, you should know that all user accounts have potentially four files associated with Bash. All are ordinarily hidden, but you can see which ones are used by your distribution by typing ls -a .bash*.

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