The Bash Shell

Ok, so you have a Unix account on the ecst servers.  Now what?  Well, one of the first things one can do is modify which shell you are using.  What is a shell?  Well that is the program that allows you to enter commands into Unix.  There are different versions and each version has different features.  The default version on the College of Engineering, Computer Science and Technology (ECST or ECT) systems is called the Korn Shell (ksh).  If you want to experiment with different shells, all you really have to do is type the name of the shell at any command prompt and you will get a new session opened with that shell.  For example, if you typed the following at the prompt (the $ represents the prompt that will be displayed, don't type it):

$ bash

You  would get a new session opened that used the bash shell.  By the way (btw), bash stands for Bourne Again SHell.  There is a shell called the Bourne shell and this is an enhanced version of that shell.

The bash shell offers some enhancements over the Korn shell.  The primary one that will concern CSCI 111 students is the ability to use the cursor keys to retrieve a command history.  Imagine the typing you can save by just hitting the up arrow key instead of typing a command line for the fiftieth time when editing and compiling a program.  Also, command completion is a really cool feature.  Begin a command and then hit the tab key to complete it.  For example if I were in my home directory and typed:

$ cd publ    (and then hit the tab key)

the command would be completed to show:

$ cd public_html/

---

If you wanted to make the bash shell your permanent shell, you would have to do it from one of our HP servers.  Some of the commands have not been transferred over to the Sun servers yet.  Here is what you do from the command prompt:

open a Putty ssh session to ??? obviously this indented technique currently doesn't work - see below's HOWEVER

$ chsh /bin/bash

The program will ask you for your password to confirm your choice of shells and then it will make the change for you.  It can take an hour or so for the change to actually be updated so you can just use the method above to make a temporary shell until the actual change is made.

At the command prompt:

$ exit

and you will be logged off of ??? and your old session from tiglon will still be active.

---

HOWEVER this does not work currently on our machines
SO in your .profile add the line
(if you do not have a .profile, make a new file with that name in your top-level directory (the directory that opens at login))

bash

. .profile

This tells Unix to do the .profile right now

You can find more information on Bash at: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html