Linux settings that are useful but turned off by default

What is your shell?

Reminded that when we talk about Shell, it usually refers to ‘Bash’, instead of ‘Fish’ or ‘Zsh’, etc. Bash, which is short for ‘Bourne Again shell’, as its name implies, is an extension of the Bourne shell. And Is the most common shell and is the default shell for most current Linux distros.

To check your type of shell, you can type this in your terminal:

$ echo $SHELL

If you’re currently using Bash, then it will prompt:

/bin/bash

shopt Command

shopt command is used to set parameters of Linux Shell. Enter shopt directly to see all the parameters and their respective status on and off.

$ shopt

Enter a param name following shopt, to check if the param is on.

$ shopt globstar
globstar off

Which shows globstar is off.

Options

1. -s
-s is used to turn on a parameter.

$ shopt -s globstar

Turn on globstar parameter, then you can search file more convenient.

For example, I’m gonna search file with the .bin extension.

$ ls **/*.bin

Then all the file with the .bin extension prompt to your terminal, no matter the file is in the current directory or not. You are not allow to do so if you don’t turn on the globstar param.

Reminded that Linux is case¹ sensitive, Turn on nocaseglob parameter so that it does’t match case when searching for files.

$ shopt -s nocaseglob

Then you don’t have to worry about not finding the file because of case mismatch.

If you’d like to share any other useful command, please let me know.

To be continued…