[institute] Unix Protips

Hey all on the institute.

I realized today I wasn't getting mail notifications, and I hadn't set them up on this shell. So here are some things I do on my local machine that work here:

To get the shell to tell you when you have new mail, after command executions, add this to your .profile

export MAILCHECK=0

And, if you want, you can have a persistent notification when you have un-incorporated mail, or more specifically, when your /var/mail/<username> isn't empty.

PS1="$([-s /var/mail/`whoami` ] && echo '* ')$PS1"

This works in /bin/ksh, I can't speak for other shells.

If anybody else has some quick tips they would like to share, I encorage them to reply to this thread.

Happy Unixing!

~xvetrd