[killer_735]

I was wondering if anyone knows of a good book/pdf/site that talks about the specific version of UNIX that's on OSX.

Also...isn't there a version of the bash shell that uses different colors to indicate different parts of commands or which color-codes ls output? If so, what do I need to do to get it?

[BkueKanoodle]

You might want to check out OS X unleashed. The last half of this mighty sized book is devoted to the Unix and OS X advanced topics.

[Ludovic Hirlimann]

Originally posted by killer_735:

Also...isn't there a version of the bash shell that uses different colors to indicate different parts of commands or which color-codes ls output? If so, what do I need to do to get it?

Yes bash "just" needs to be configured. try man bash, or if you want to gt into it faster I do recommend you read this

[utidjian]

Originally posted by killer_735:
I was wondering if anyone knows of a good book/pdf/site that talks about the specific version of UNIX that's on OSX.

Also...isn't there a version of the bash shell that uses different colors to indicate different parts of commands or which color-codes ls output? If so, what do I need to do to get it?

I heard that the O'Reilly book "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual" is good. See: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/macosxmm2/

Well I used the Linux doc page: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/index.html
to modify my bash prompt for the root user. I created a .bashrc file in roots home folder (/var/root) on my Mac OS X boxes. My .bashrc contains this line:

## Added for roots attention ##
PS1="\[[\033[1;31m\]\u\[\033[0m\]@\hW]\[\033[1;31m\]#\[\033[0m\] "

Then just:

source .bashrc

try it and you will see what I mean. If you don't like the red you can try other colors (see the howto). I did it so that it is obvious who I am... perhaps causing me to hesitate before I hit return on some possibly disastrous command.

The other thing you need is a "colorized" version of ls. The one that comes with Mac OS X can not do the colorizing. I think you can find one here: http://www.osxgnu.org/software/Fileutils/lsc/

I haven't tried it yet so I would be interested in how well it works for you. You may need to config it a bit for your tastes.

Linux has had color ls for quite a while. Folders are in blue, soft-links in cyan, regular files in green, files that are rwx in red, broken links have a red background... and so on. It also has a colorized version of vi which in some distributions is VERY handy. It correctly colorizes and highlights the file... automagically adjusts for what type of config file it is and whatnot.