If you don’t like the default shell on your system you can easily change it with the chsh command e.g. chsh -s /opt/local/bin/bash You will be asked to enter your password to make the change.

You can use whereis to search standard binary, manual page and source directories for the specified programs. This can be particularly handy when you are trying to find where in the ports tree an application is. Try whereis firefox and whereis whereis.

You can use aliases to decrease the amount of typing you need to do to get commands you commonly use. Examples of fairly popular aliases include (in Bourne shell style, as in /bin/sh, bash, ksh, and zsh): alias lf="ls -FA" alias ll="ls -lA" alias su="su -m" In csh or tcsh, these would be alias lf ls -FA alias ll ls -lA alias su su -m To remove an alias, you can usually use unalias aliasname. To list all aliases, you can usually type just alias.

Need to do a search in a man page or in a file you’ve sent to a pager (like less or more)? Use “/search_word”. To repeat the same search, type “n” for next.

FreeBSD and other Unix systems use man pages for system documentation, they are called by the man command. For FreeBSD the following are useful man pages: man firewall will give advice for building a FreeBSD firewall man hier will explain the way FreeBSD filesystems are normally laid out. Man pages are divided into section depending on topic. There are 9 different sections numbered from 1 (General Commands) to 9 (Kernel Developer’s Manual). You can get an introduction to each topic by typing man <number> intro In other words, to get the intro to general commands, type man 1 intro man ports gives many useful hints about installing FreeBSD ports. man security gives very good advice on how to tune the security of your FreeBSD system. man tuning gives some tips how to tune performance of your FreeBSD system.

If you accidentally end up inside vi, you can quit it by pressing Escape, colon (:), q (q), bang (!) and pressing return.

If other operating systems have damaged your Master Boot Record, you can reinstall it with boot0cfg(8). See man boot0cfg for details.

Having trouble using fetch through a firewall? Try setting the environment variable FTP_PASSIVE_MODE to yes, and see fetch(3) for more details.

You can adjust your bash prompt to virtually anything you like. Handy bash(1) prompt: PS1="\u@\h \w \!$" You can find more here: Bash Prompts

FreeBSD is started up by the program ‘init’. The first thing init does when starting multiuser mode (ie, starting the computer up for normal use) is to run the shell script /etc/rc. By reading /etc/rc and the /etc/rc.d/ scripts, you can learn a lot about how the system is put together, which again will make you more confident about what happens when you do something with it.