I have used Bash in my career for many years and it is so convenient for data analysis.

In MacOS, however, the default shell is zsh. To make use of bash in MacOS, one need the following steps:

Install the latest version of bash

One can use brew (the MacOS package manager) to install the latest bash. This will install bash to /usr/local/bin/bash.

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brew install bash

Change the default shell to /usr/local/bin/bash

To change the default shell in MacOS, one need run the following command:

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# add the newly installed bash to the system list
sudo echo '/usr/local/bin/bash' >>/etc/shells
# change the default shell
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash

Now exit the terminal and reopen one, the default shell should be the new bash.

Setup .bashrc

Since the MacOS terminal uses login based shell, it won’t read the file .bashrc (in contrast to *nix systems).

Also, the bash shell reads the config file firstly found in the following order (the rest are ignored:

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1. ~/.bash_profile
2. ~/.bash_login
3. ~/.profile

So one need to include the following section in the config file to trigger .bashrc.

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if [[ -r ~/.bashrc ]]; then
  source ~/.bashrc
fi

Install coretutils package

coreutils contains the main programs of GNU operating systems, including dircolors. Therefore, to use the tools, one can install it with brew

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brew install coreutils

This will install the utilities to a specific folder. To run these commands without the folder prefix, one need to add this folder to $PATH.

For dircolors, one also need to change the path in .bashrc to take effect.

Happy programming 😄!!!

References

• Explanation of zsh/bash startup files: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/zshbash-startup-files-loading-order-bashrc-zshrc-etc/

Last modified on 2023-05-22