Here are some suggestions to make using UNIX easier to use on your machine. (Before following these suggestions, first type echo $PATH at the command line to see what the PATH variable currently contains.) In your .bash_profile file: --------------------------- To change your command line prompt to show you which directory you are in, add the following to your .bash_profile file: PS1="\w > "; export PS1 To help the system find programs you want to run, add items to your PATH variable. If it does not contain . (a . by itself indicates the current directory) you probably want to add that to the PATH. You may also want to add other directories, such as the Applications folder if you're on a Mac OS machine. Here is an example that adds both of those (notice that directories are separated by colons). export PATH=${PATH}:/Applications:. Note the period at the end; this is what adds the current directory to the PATH! Note also that it is very important to include the old path (${PATH}) or else you will lose the ability to run basic UNIX commands. To allow you to cd quickly to commonly used directories, add to your CDPATH variable the names of the directories ABOVE the ones you want to cd to. For example, if I want to cd easily to directories under my Documents folder (e.g., cd Teaching or cd Photos to get to Documents/Teaching or Document/Photos) and also to directories under my Ramp folder (e.g., cd installation or cd tests to get to Ramp/installation or Ramp/tests), then I might put the following in my .bash_profile: export CDPATH=${CDPATH}:$HOME/Documents:$HOME/WebApplications/Ramp If you are doing web page development, you may also want to add your personal Document Root directory and/or the system's Document Root directory to your CD path. The actual pathnames for these are different for native Mac OS, Linus, LAMP, MAMP, and XAMP. For native Mac OS, you might add: export CDPATH=${CDPATH}:$HOME/Sites:/Library/WebServer/Documents The following are useful aliases (shortcuts) that you could add to a .bashrc file or .bash_profile file. alias a='alias' alias back='cd "$OLDPWD"' alias bye='clear; exit' alias dirt='ls -aFR' alias l='ls -aF' alias psg='ps -ax | grep' alias recent="ls -lt | head" If you are doing web development and using Zend Framework, add: alias apache2ctl='sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl' alias zf=/usr/local/ZendFramework/bin/zf.sh (The actual pathname for apachectl will depend on the version of Apache you are running.) If you added the aliases to a .bashrc file, you should edit your .bash_profile and .bashrc files as follows: edit .bash_profile and add the following (NOT indented!) if [ -r ~/.bashrc ] then . ~/.bashrc fi edit .bashrc and add the following (NOT indented!): if [ -r /etc/bashrc ] then . /etc/bashrc fi