This is the eighth in a series of posts I’m writing about my upgrade to Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar”. See my introduction to the series for the other posts.
Today’s posting is a little different. Instead of posting about my solution, I’m posting about a problem — with enough details that hopefully we can figure out the answer together. There are changes in the Unix environment which affect the use of Terminal (or the shell in general, in Unix terms). Specifically, I have a number of shell scripts, which I’ve put into my ~/bin directory, which are no longer being found when I try to use them at the command line. They work fine if I give the full path to them, but can no longer be started by their names alone.
There seems to be some differences in the way that tcsh, the default shell for Mac OS X, is initialized, and that seems a likely culprit. When I compare my archived system with the live system, I can see that some apparently interesting files have been moved to a location that seems like it makes them inactive:
Old System: /usr/share/init
- aliases
- completions
- environment
- login
- logout
- rc
- README
- tcsh.defaults
New System: /usr/share/tcsh/examples
- aliases
- completions
- environment
- login
- logout
- rc
- README
- tcsh.defaults
The files themselves appear to be the same, but they’ve been moved to a location where they may not be activated.
The README file gives clues as to where one should put the login, logout, and rc files to make them active for a user, or for the whole system. But it’s not at all clear what one should do with the aliases, completions, or environment files.
Any suggestions? E-mail me at the address in the sidebar! (And help me test the new Mail.app ;-)