Part of Bernhard Reiter's archive.

Unix (on UWM) Hints

What I found out about the Unix installation running on the local UWM campus alpha machines and consider helpful for others. My login resides on alpha1.csd.uwm.edu. Your milage may vary, and there is NO WARRANTY for correctness of this information. I just share, what I know.

Unix?

Do you want to peek at UNIXhelp for Users? Oh some people here in at UWM never saw a unix shell prompt! (Because the default seems to be the ugly ezsh menu. You have to go to unix from there and sometimes even type clear after confirmation... )

Software I like to use:

I had to compile it myself.

VI-M A very powerful editor. Can do syntax highlighting on terminals. Only for people who are into the "vi". A great advantage is, that it runs on almost all platforms.
SLRN is a powerful, easy to use, threaded internet newsreader for Unix, VMS, OS/2, and Win32 systems.
The Gimp Great, pixelorientated graphics program.

bash (Bourne again shell)

If you interactively use the unix shell (=command prompt) at all, use a decent shell. I like the bash, which has command line editing(cursor keys) and filename completion (via pressing the tab key).

To change your shell, try: "chsh" and give the path to your new shell, like "/usr/local/bin/bash". "finger" your login name to find out about your default shell.

`more` or `less`?

Both programs help to paginate the output of unix files or commands on your screen. You should prefer less over more, because the more installation here seems to have a problem when showing very long files: sometimes you see garbage characters. less also can be more customized, understance more format tricks (like the ones in the mutt manual). Usually you exit less by pressing the "q" key.

mutt

Terminal Mailreader, IMHO many advantages over pine: color, PGP/MIME conformant, threading.

Documentation

Mutt is installed and can be used. No manpage, but the documentation can be found in the local file "/usr/local/doc/mutt". Read it not with more, but with the program less.

color

If you want color, you have to use a trick. :-( (At least I do not know a different method.) You need:

An configuration file, which defines colors. (There seems to be no default configuration file installed here.) See colordefinitions from my ~./muttrc or the colordefinitions from the sample-muttrc file coming with mutt-0.93.2 You need something like that in your ~/.muttrc file.
A terminalprogram which does color (hint: the plain windows "telnet" AFAIK does not do color, "QvtTerm" does, "CRT" does but needs to be told in the configuration to do so.) and a method to tell the program about it, what kind of terminal program you use. The following was learned from The Mutt FAQ(v1.0pl15), Section: Common Problems:
```
   $ mkdir ~/.terminfo/
   $ mkdir ~/.terminfo/v
   
```
Save this file as ~/.terminfo/v/vt102-c. Or copy it from my homedirectory on the alphas: cp ~bernhard/.terminfo/v/vt102-c ~/.terminfo/v/

Then call mutt with the right environment variables set. In bash you can do it like:
   TERM=vt102-c mutt
or create an alias like with that line in your .profile file (if you are using the bash, otherwise find out, how your shell does aliases):
   alias mutt="TERM=vt102-c mutt"
Your editor called by mutt might still have a problem with the TERM environment variable, because the old programs were complied with an old version of curses, which cannot use the terminfo terminal information. To work around that, you have to save the old TERM variable somewhere and add a line to your mutt configuration file to use that old TERM value for the editor.
(bash alias for mutt:)
    alias mutt="TERM_SAVED=$TERM TERM=vt102-c mutt"
and the following line in the ~/.muttrc:
    set editor=TERM=$TERM_SAVED $EDITOR

No "Move read mail to mbox?" question

The following line in your ~/.muttrc will prevent mutt from moving read mail into your mbox folder and raise questions about it:


set move=no

Unix Texteditors?

If you want to edit any file in a textformat (e.g. a HTML file or a mail) you need a texteditor. As far as I know you have the following basic choises here: pico,vi (or vim),jove and emacs.

Navindra Umanee from the Dept of Computer Science,McGill University explains some that unix Editors.

Where are all the new program versions?

Strangely enough the UWM administration doesn't seems to assign enough resources to maintain the modern unix tools, though it wouldn't be much work. So most of the stuff can be found in the /usr/local/test/ subdirectories. Look there first, before asking a question about a new program version.

How does `find` work?

The installed find command (bsd4.3) acts a bit strange, if you know the standard GNU find. You need to specify an option to actually get a read directory search. Otherwise a database is queried. See the difference, try:

find ~ -name '*.html' -print

to find .html files in your homedirectory and in contrast

find ~ -name '*.html'

archived: December 2003 - page revision: Thu Aug 26 23:59:43 CDT 1999

Part of Bernhard Reiter's archive.

[ Archived: Bernhard's UWM Homepage ]