TCSH Shortcuts

The following is a list of shortcuts Pratt students may want to add to their .cshrc profile. This, first of all, assumes that they are using the tcsh shell. To check this, type

echo $SHELL

If the result is

/bin/tcsh

than this page applies to you; if not, see the BASH Shortcuts page.

If you are a tcsh shell user, you will simply add the following to the end of your .cshrc file.

Stayin' Alive

There is currently a 10-minute inactivity timeout on remote logins. In order to eliminate this, add the following line to your .cshrc file:

xeyes -geometry 1x1-1-1 &

This will start the xeyes program off screen and in the background. With this program running, however, your session will not time out. If that puts an xeyes window on your screen, try

xeyes -geometry 1x1-1-100 &

instead.

AFS Directory Shortcut

If you are in a class that is using the AFS space (specifically so that permission can be set and such), you may want to add a line to your .cshrc file to get there more efficiently. The information on that is at the AFS Course Space page, specifically in the /bin/tcsh users section.

latex and dvips in One Command

Now that you need to run both latex and dvips to get a PostScript file for evince to look at, you may want to have a shorter way that having to type

latex FILE.tex
dvips -t FILE.dvi

every time. To make a /bin/tcsh shortcut for that, add the following to your .cshrc file:

alias ltx 'latex \!:$.tex ; dvips -t letter \!:$.dvi'

From that point on, once the .cshrc runs to start your session, you can simply type

ltx FILE

and it will run

latex FILE.tex
dvips -t letter FILE.dvi