On Fri, 27 Mar 1998, William T Wilson wrote:
>On Fri, 27 Mar 1998, Greg Thomas wrote:
>>Adding aliases to the dist, IMO, would be very bad. People would use dir,
>>or md, or whatever, without ever knowing the corresponding Linux commands.
>>What would motivate people to learn the OS this way?
>
>I have mixed feelings here. The first thing I do whenever I install
>a Red Hat version of Linux is fix all the little "preferences" which I
>consider completely idiotic. I change the default prompt so it looks
>like Slackware; I can remember what system I'm logged in on but find it
>useful to know what directory I'm in.
When you're regularly logged into three or four systems in multiple
xterms, having the system name in the prompt is pretty handy. Whatever
the case, prompts are and always have been a very personal thing.
Everybody likes a different prompt. Red Hat's default is no better or
worse than anyone else's. Personally, I think RH should have stuck
with the shell defaults rather than set their own, but I don't think
it's a big deal either way. Most users either don't care or are going
to change it anyway.
>I get rid of the aliases on mv, rm, and cp, since all they do is slow
>things down.
But that's good for newbies. In a multi-user environment such as an
ISP, adding "-i" to everything is *very* valuable. When I completely
redesigned our login scripts, I made a point of making sure those aliases
stayed in.
>I add an alias to ls so it displays color.
Not always good in multi-user environments. Not all terminal emulators
handle colors very well.
>In short I make a couple little tweaks. Who is to say that adding
>a set of "DOS compatibility aliases" is so wrong?
Personally, I like the idea of environment options. Say, if the user
has a certain file ($HOME/.dosenv), the system login scripts add certain
additional environment features to mimic DOS. The login configuration
system we use here looks in a directory named .shellconf in the
user's login directory for a whole variety of configurable parameters.
For instance, if the user wants to define the $ORGANIZATION environment
variable, they need only put the defintion they want into a file named
"organization" in their ".shellconf" directory. The advantage is that
users don't have to tinker with any shell scripts at all. The down side
is that it slows login down a little.
>Yes, it prevents the user from using the Unix commands and makes Linux
>seem like DOS. But for those familiar with DOS it may make things easier.
>The best thing would be aliasing it to something like
>
>alias dir="echo 'dir is a DOS command, you should use ls instead'; sleep
>2; ls"
Except "dir" is not strictly a DOS command, and its existance in DOS
doesn't preclude its existance in any other environment. There's no
reason Linux can't also have a "dir" command.
--
Steve Coile
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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