BeTips (The BeOS Tip Server)

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: 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 […]

You can have the title bar of your Terminal session always report the current working directory. For example, if the current directory is /boot/home/Words, it will say that in the Terminal session’s title tab. Just add the following function to your /boot/home/.profile: function path_title() { echo -en „33]2;`pwd`07“ } PROMPT_COMMAND=path_title Open a new Terminal and […]

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 you want to apply a custom layout of attributes and sort orders to existing folders that currently have generic layouts, you’ll need some query templates — one for each filetype you want a custom Tracker layout for. By default, you should have several of these installed already — take a look in ~/config/settings/Tracker/DefaultQueryTemplates. Some […]

If you are bored of the plain black and white colour file listings when you type „ls“ in your Terminal, you can actually make the ls command colour the files based on their type (not mime type, but directory, symlink, etc) and extension. If you add the switch -C or –color to the ls command […]

Tired of having the words „Welcome to the Beos Shell“ greet you every time you launch the terminal? Navigate via Tracker to /boot/beos/etc/profile. You’ll need to make this file writeable. Right-click and select Get Info, then click on the little arrow at the lower left next to „Permission.“ Make the file Writable by Owner. Next, […]

You can use your choice of Tracker add-ons to quickly open a Terminal on the current Tracker window, but what if you want to go the other way and open a Tracker window on the Terminal’s current directory? There are a number of ways to do this, but the easiest way I’ve found is to […]