A reader from Austria writes:
As I’m now working through your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Jaguar, I can’t get the commands “alias” and “grep” to work. Has been there a change in the command definition from Jaguar to Panther?
The default command shell did change between Jaguar and Panther (that is, between Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3): in 10.2 the default shell was /bin/tcsh and in 10.3 the default shell is /bin/bash. This means that the format of an alias has changed, among other things. I do have a Panther edition of the book, but in a nutshell aliases should look like this:
alias ls=’ls -F’
In terms of grep not working, that shouldn’t be an issue. Is it in your PATH? That is, if you type:
which grep
Does it find the command?
One of the more controversial changes in the Jaguar to Panther update was this transition from tcsh to bash, but I have to say that I’m a big fan of the Bash shell, so for me, it was a good transition. Remember also that if you want to stick with the tcsh shell, you can simply change you default shell setting in the Terminal.app application. Go to Terminal -> Preferences and specify a different shell with “Execute this command (specify complete path)” by entering /bin/tcsh and ensuring that the second option is selected, not the default.