Goals for this Hour

In this hour, you learn

• How to turn on the C shell and Korn shell history mechanism

• How to use csh history and ksh history to cut down on typing

• About command aliases in the C and Korn shells

• Some power aliases for csh

• How to set custom prompts

• How to create simple shell scripts

This hour focuses on two key facets of the C and Korn shells: the history mechanism and the command alias capability. I guarantee that within a few minutes of learning about these two functions, you will be certain that you couldn't have survived as happily in UNIX without them. There are three ways to ensure that you don't enter commands more than once: csh history enables you to repeat previous commands without reentering them, an alias enables you to name one command as another, and shell scripts enable you to toss a bunch of commands into a file to be used as a single command. You learn the basics about building shell scripts in this hour.

One of the fun parts of UNIX is that you can customize the prompt that greets you each time you use the system. There's no need to be trapped with a boring % prompt anymore!