Customizing your environment

Changing your 'dotfiles' to suit your preferences.

1. Places in your dotfiles that you might want to modify:

the default printer
the umask (the default is umask 022, which makes all new directories accessible and all files readable) - if you want complete privacy change it to umask 077, but then you will have to worry about making certain things accessible, such as your WWW directory (chmod a+rx WWW), .plan (chmod a+r .plan), and any files you want others to be able to see - see also help protection)
biff y or n (doesn't work on turing because mail arrives on hypatia)
personal addition to paths and TEXINPUTS
. first thing in the path or not, depending whether you are adventurous and want to risk your files or not. Putting it last is much safer, leaving it out completely and using ./ when running local commands is safest. See this FAQ for an explanation.
the bits that set the display and terminal type right depending on where you log on from (an example)
autologout
personal aliases

2. Nice versions of common things:

3. And some idiosyncratic things I use a lot:

alias ecop 'genscript -2 -r \!* | lpr -h -Pvalkyr'
(print eco(nomi/logi)cally)
alias fp 'head -128 \!* | genscript -2 -r | lpr -h -Pvalkyr'
(print the first page of a file eco(nomi/logi)cally)
alias psp 'psnup -2r \!* | lpr -h -Pvalkyr'
(print a ps-file eco(nomi/logi)cally)
alias dvip 'dvips -f \!* | psnup -2r | lpr -h -Pvalkyr'
(print a dvi-file eco(nomi/logi)cally)
alias gzgrep 'gzcat \!$ | grep -i \!:1'
(greps in gzipped file)
alias rsls 'ls -Ral | grep '-' | grep -v '/' | sort -rn +4 | more'
(recursive listing by size of all files in and below the current directory - great for finding your biggest quota-eaters, i.e. the files most worth deleting or compressing if possible!)
alias rslsgz 'ls -Ral | grep '-' | grep -v '/' | grep -v '.gz' | sort -rn +4 | more'
(same as above except shows only the files that aren't already gzipped)