bash

The Bourne Again Shell, the usual default CLI shell on Linux and (nowadays, anyway) Mac. Which is handy if you flit between them.

• Bash GNU Project page
• Bash manual (available in various formats; of course you can enter man bash in your term)

On Mac, you can control various options for your Terminal experience inside an invisible file named .bash_profile -- invisible to the Finder, at least, but editable from within the Terminal.

In previous versions of Mac OS X, many Mac experts advised users to edit the /etc/hostconfig file if you wanted to change the hostname in your terminal prompt. As of Tiger, however, that file isn't used for that purpose anymore. Here's a simple alternative method I wrote up for oreillynet.com: Changing your bash prompt hostname in Tiger.