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.

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