BeTips.net

Open /boot/home/.profile and scan down until you find a line that reads: PS1=’$ ‚ Edit it so that it reads PS1=’$PWD> ‚ The next time you open up Terminal, the prompt will report the current directory, no matter what you do. PWD is a Unix/Be command meaning Print Working Directory — you’ve just told Terminal […]

BeOS includes a port of the famous Unix „fortune“ command, which delivers a random pseudo-profundity when you type „fortune“ at a Terminal prompt. To get your fortune told every time you launch the Terminal, open up the file /boot/home/.profile and add these lines: /boot/beos/bin/fortune printf “ „

Sick of that goofy $ in your Bash shell? Don’t know where the heck you currently are? Here’s a nice prompt that has colors and shows you the current location! Change the colors as needed if you want, or just use the defaults! Stick this in a file /boot/home/.profile If the file doesn’t exist, create […]

By adding a few lines to /boot/home/.profile, you can extend the functionality of the bash shell in BeOS. For instance, you can use all those freaky ANSI tags to make the terminal prettier. Paste the following block into your ~/.profile (note that this stuff also works for bash on other platforms that support ANSI color […]

If you type a command into Terminal, where does it look for the program you’ve specified? The system looks in a set of directories established in your PATH statement. A number of directories are specified in the default path as soon as you boot BeOS. But what if you want to add to that list? […]

Telnet’ing to PINE on a remote server does not work with Terminal, since the environment variable TERM is set to ‚beterm‘, and PINE does not recognize this kind of terminal. This can be solved by typing export TERM=vt100 in the Terminal, or adding it to /boot/home/.profile. Depending on your Terminal needs, you can also use […]

If there are lengthy Terminal commands you find yourself typing over and over again, why not create a nice, easy-to-remember shortcut? Unix‘ alias feature is, of course, part of BeOS, and all you have to do to take advantage of it is to insert aliases on your /boot/home/.profile file. For example, if you find you […]

Update: It’s now possible to install the real man utility, making this tip obsolete for some users. Using the BeOS terminal environment can be frustrating when you can’t remember how a command works. BeOS includes a small collection of man pages formatted in HTML. This tip sets up the familiar (to UNIX folks) man for […]

The enormous GeekGadgets collection includes a ton of BeOS ports of common Unix tools. Unfortunately, these tools assume you know how to bootstrap yourself — the Amiga-centric documentation they come with won’t give you the slightest clue how to get them running on BeOS. Here’s a crash course: 1) Create a GeekGadgets subdirectory in /boot/apps […]

While the official place to put executable files that you’ve added to the system yourself and want to be accessible from any Terminal prompt is /boot/home/config/bin, many people who work with a lot of scripts find it useful to store them in a separate directory, to keep them separate from the uneditable, actual binaries living […]