Solaris is a really horrible version of unix. It's the kid who sits in the back and does just enough to pass, and nothing more. Fortunately, it has a very good package management system, and many users who have ported GNU tools to it to bring it up to speed. Unfortunately, only system administrators can use it. Lowly users are stuck with a crummy version of Solaris if the sysadmins are lazy. Except that they're NOT! This howto has some modifications to make using the command line more bearable in Solaris.
Solaris by default installs bash. While bash can be a nice shell with the help of bash-completion, you can find a lot more desirable features from other shells. For example:
Command history
tab autocompletion of filenames
tab autocompletion of command options
extremely customizable environment
ability to turn on auto-nohup to disconnect the terminal from any run programs
Example 1. Output from the command line
mentor.ics.purdue.edu:~>chsh Old shell: /usr/local/bin/tcsh New shell [/usr/local/bin/tcsh]:Junk to see the list Illegal 'loginShell' value: 'Junk to see the list'. Available shells include "/sbin/sh /sbin/jsh /bin/sh /bin/bash /bin/csh /bin/ksh /usr/bin/sh /usr/bin/csh /usr/bin/ksh /usr/dt/bin/dtksh /usr/local/bin/tcsh /opt/acmaint/etc/message /opt/acmaint/etc/nologin /opt/acmaint-3.5/etc/message /opt/acmaint-3.5/etc/nologin" New shell [/usr/local/bin/tcsh]: /usr/local/bin/tcsh
In Solaris, info about color would be stored in a file under /usr/share/lib/terminfo/, normally
/usr/share/lib/terminfo/x/xterm-color
If you can convince your admin to add this file at this location, adding color is easy - just do "set term=xterm-color" and you'll have color. If your admin is afraid that you've built a bomb for him, he can build this file himself using the "tic" utitlity and this file.
Example 2. Making and storing colormap
mkdir ~/.terminfo setenv TERMINFO ~/.terminfo tic xterm-color.tic -v
If you're using bash instead of tcsh (or for some reason it doesn't work), replace "setenv TERMINFO ~/.terminfo" with "export TERMINFO=~/.terminfo"
While this makes the system color, many major utilities, such as, for instance, "ls" are not color. Here is the gnu version of "ls" for Sparc-Solaris, which allows color. More on that later.
If your administrator has installed vim, you can use this with color settings. Adding this file as .vimrc will cause most common file types to be loaded with color syntax highlighting:
Example 3. My .vimrc:
:filetype on
autocmd FileType matlab,c,cpp,bash,perl,tcsh call Progiterface()
function Progiterface()
syn on
set number linebreak softtabstop=4 cindent
endfunction
bash may be customized with set and export, or implicitly. I recommend putting all of these settings in a file called ~/.bash_login, as the ~/.bashrc may not be called by default. Here is my .bash_login file, with enhancements for color, as well as bash completion, as well as the ~/bin directory to put the "ls" script in. Bash completion is allows bash to autocomplete many commands through the tab key, and must be downloaded separately (from here). I saved my completion script as ~/.bash_completion, for this file.
Example 4. My ..bash_login file
PS1="\[\033[35m\]\H\[\033[33m\]:\[\033[36m\]\w\[\033[0m\]>" alias vi=vim set path=($path ~/bin ) alias ls="~/bin/ls --color=auto" if [ $TERM = "xterm" ] then export TERMINFO=~/.terminfo; TERM=xterm-color; fi [ -z "$BASH_COMPLETION" ] && declare -r BASH_COMPLETION=~/.bash_completion source ~/.bash_completion
tcsh may be customized by changing it's environment variables with the "set" and "setenv" commands. On Solaris, I recommend putting all of these settings in a file called ~/.tcshrc, which will automatically be read once for each new terminal. Here is my .tcshrc file, with enhancements to use xterm-color if you have an xterm, as well as adding a history file and setting up a ~/bin directory as part of the path. If you downloaded "ls" in a previous section, this would be a good place to put it.
It also includes my shell prompt.
Example 5. My .tcshrc file
set prompt="%{\033[35m%}%M%u%{\033[33m%}:%{\033[36m%}%~%{\033[0m%}>"
alias vi vim
set history=1000
set savehist=999
set autolist="ambiguous"
set path=($path ~/bin )
alias ls '~/bin/ls --color=auto'
if ($term == "xterm") then
setenv TERMINFO ~/.terminfo
set term=xterm-color
endif
Zsh may be customized with the "setopt" or "export" commands. Usually this is done with a .zshrc file (though there are many other ways). Here is my zshrc file, which does everything that the .tcshrc file does, but also includes the ability to ignore hangup signals from the terminal (if you're running a program and get disconnected it won't stop running).
Example 6. My .zshrc file
PS1="$(print '%{\e[35m%}')%n@%m$(print '%{\e[33m%}'):$(print '%{\e[36m%}')%~$(print '%{\e[0m%}')>"
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias vi=vim
setopt nohup
HISTSIZE=1000
HISTFILE=~/.zsh_history
SAVEHIST=1000
setopt INC_APPEND_HISTORY
if [[ $term == "xterm' ]] then
term="xterm-color"
export TERMINFO=~/.terminfo
fi