Mac OS X 10.2: Tab Completion and Aliases in Terminal Differ From Earlier Versions

After updating to Mac OS X 10.2, tcsh uses standard defaults for the shell. To use the customized aliases and completions from version 10.1.5 or earlier, see the tcsh Read Me file.
Symptom

Tab completion and certain command aliases, such as 'll' and 'l', behave differently with Mac OS X 10.2 than with Mac OS X 10.1.5 or earlier.


Solution

Terminal in Mac OS X 10.2 defaults to industry-standard settings for tcsh, rather than to the highly customized default set used in version 10.1.5 or earlier. This change brings the default behavior of Terminal in line with other UNIX operating systems.

If you want to have some or all of the customized set that was previously used, see:

/usr/share/tcsh/examples/README

Note: If you follow the instructions in the README, you will see an issue in which, when logging into OS X computers via ssh, you see the alert message:

You may safely ignore this message.

The error message is caused by a issue in the file /usr/share/tcsh/examples/aliases. If you are familiar and comfortable with editing files as root, you may resolve the error by commenting out these lines as illustrated:

#if ("$TERM_PROGRAM" == "Apple_Terminal") then
# alias settermtitle 'echo -n "ESC]2;\\!:1^G"'
#endif
Published Date: Oct 10, 2016