Solaris notes

When using Solaris the first thing I miss is shell command history accessed by the arrow keys, and file name completion. Luckily there is an easy way to get this without installing a new shell. The supplied ksh works just fine, and only needs to be told about the arrow keys.

I just set my shell to ksh and put this little snippet in my .profile.

set -o emacs
alias __A=`/bin/echo "\020"` # Up
alias __B=`/bin/echo "\016"` # Down
alias __C=`/bin/echo "\006"` # Right
alias __D=`/bin/echo "\002"` # Left
alias __H=`/bin/echo "\001"` # Home
alias __p=`/bin/echo "\004"` # Delete
alias __q=`/bin/echo "\005"` # End
alias __z=`/bin/echo "\017"` # Clear

All this lacks is tab completion of filenames. ksh uses ESC ESC for filename completion, and doesn't display a list if you repeat the command when there's a conflict like bash does.

I don't use the automounter, so to make /home usable instead of the default Solaris setup of /export/home I edit /etc/auto.master and comment everything out. Also edit /etc/vfstab to mount the partition previously at /export/home on /home and reboot. This 'fixes' things so /home is usable.

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