This installation of bash has been set up to use an init system similar to the tcsh installed by OS X. In order to use this configuration: echo "source ~/.bashrc" > ~/.bash_profile echo "source /sw/share/init/bash/rc" > ~/.bashrc echo "source /sw/bin/init.sh" >> ~/.bashrc In order to customize this setup: mkdir ~/Library/init/bash and create the following files there as necessary: aliases.mine - shell aliases completions.mine - completions environment.mine - environment rc.mine - run commands path - command search path See the corresponding file in /sw/share/init/bash for more information about the role of each file. You can easily extend or override the configuration provided by the default file. For example, you can add more aliases by adding the appropriate commands in aliases.mine. The init files were originally written by Wilfredo Sanchez, but they contained a few errors which I've taken the liberty of correcting.