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 bashin 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.