Re: FW: What goes where?
Re: FW: What goes where?
- Subject: Re: FW: What goes where?
- From: Randy Ford <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 15:31:30 -0600
On Friday, February 21, 2003, at 07:40 PM, Preston Black wrote:
Thanks for the tip, Edward. At least this is a beginning.
If there is no such document, could we put our collective heads
together and do this as a group? It would be very helpful to those of
us who are relative newbies, trying to get the most out of X11.
Most of X is documented in the manual. Use "man X" as the starting
point. While it doesn't give information about every file, it does
about many. It gives pointers based on topics that will lead to the
others.
For example, it does give the location of the rgb.txt colors database,
but not of xinitrc. However, it has a section titled "STARTING UP"
that describes xinit. Man xinit gives the details about the .xinitrc
file.
I don't believe that a list of files would help most people. What they
really want to know is things like "How do I change what happens when
the X server is launched?" As this list demonstrates, just knowing
that ~/.xinitrc is used at X server startup is not sufficient; a deeper
understanding which can be obtained from reading the manual may be
sufficient.
The manual is terse, and not written to be entertaining. However, it
is the best (and many times only) reference documenting Unix systems
that most people have. The more times that people are referred to it,
the more likely they are to read some and start understanding instead
of just copying what other people write. Of course, we still need to
give people answers to their questions, or they will just go away and
never learn.
It is possible to learn most everything from the man pages: I learned
xlib, then Xt, then Motif programming with only the man pages. Of
course, each of these was learned on the job with too little time to do
too big of a job with too few tools. (Ah, the "three 'too's" of the
programming profession!)
<rant>
Now, the problem here caused by Apple: they have not created/updated
the documentation about how they have modified the system for the beta.
Of course, it is a beta!
</rant>
As a read about how to get things to work, there are frequent
referrals to files in my home directory. But when I look, some of
these files do not exist.
Most user editable dot-files in the users home directory are only used
to override default behaviors. They will often not be there unless
manually created by the user. Some files (like .login or .profile) may
have been copied there by the sysadmin or tool for the user's or
sysadmin's convenience from some skeleton directory. The other
dot-files in a users home are commonly created by programs to hold
configuration or temporary data.
Maybe examples of basic tschrc, bashrc, profile, etc. would be useful
as well as starting points for customizing our systems.
I doubt you will find examples of these too useful. Until you use a
command enough to see how you use it, how will you know how you want it
to default?
I just look through my .env, .bash_rc, .profile, and .bash_profile
(yes, I use them all), and I don't see anything I think would be
generally needed. The closest that I see is setting bash to use
vi-like key-bindings for command editing instead of emacs ones.
(Aliasing emacs to /bin/false would make many systems run faster. <duck
/> <grin />)
The shell is the point to start learning and customizing your system.
"man tcsh", or whatever shell you are using, will describe any of the
startup files used by that shell. It will also describe the default
behaviors, and the priority and order of execution of startup files.
One using only tcsh as a shell doesn't need to know about
.bash_profile. One not using vim doesn't need to know about .gvimrc.
Learning the shell well will also lead to understanding the rest of
Unix. A path through learning an using the shell will lead to learning
about the file system, basic security, process creation and completion,
signals, and streams. This is a good start along the path to grok Unix
and ultimate happiness.
I would also caution about beginning too early to customize the system.
Many here who want customizations only want them because they've grown
used to other systems working that way. (I can't count the number of
times I've seen customizations to make the shell look more like MS-DOS.
It reminds me of people using #defines in C to make it look like
Pascal.) If you don't require a change to the default, try it for a
while. Then you'll have some basis for making a decision.
While many (myself included <grin />) think that Apple doesn't give
enough configurations to OS X, most will agree that Unix, including
X11, gives more than enough options for even the most sophisticated
user to shoot themselves in both feet. Most of the defaults, however,
make sense. Keep in mind that you hear on this list from people who
want to change the default behaviors, but you don't here from the rest
who like them like they are.
randy
--
It's all a /bin/sh game. /usr/bin/chsh to change the game.
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