BeTips.net

Update: All of the principles in this tip still apply, but you can get most or all of this done much more easily with FlipSide’s MP3 Army Knife. Since you’ll probably soon be using a BeIA-based home stereo component to play all of your MP3s through a central home server, you want to make sure […]

If you find yourself frequently needing to get to a specific directory location in the shell and you’re already looking at it in the Tracker, download a copy of Sander Stok’s Summon add-on. Install it in ~/config/add-ons/Tracker and rename it with the letter of the hotkey you want. If you name to be able to […]

Update: The bulk of this tip is preserved for posterity, but in the editor’s humble opinion, is unnecessarily complex. If all you want to do is burn audio CDs, BeOS includes the „CDBurner“ application, which makes the process incredibly easy. CdManager is also excellent. If you want to burn data CDs, I recommend downloading WriteCD […]

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 […]

This tip builds on the information in the tip Title your Terminal. If you’d like the title of your Terminal windows to reflect the current working directory, you need to do two things: 1) Edit your .profile file (in your home directory) and add the line PROMPT_COMMAND=~/config/bin/term 2) Create a file called term (or use […]

To get a nice printout of which libraries are required by a given application, cut and paste the text below into your .profile. Once you’ve done that, you can just type getlibs appname (where appname is the name of the application you want to investigate) in your Terminal to find the needed libraries. getlibs() { […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]