To change an environment variable in /bin/sh use:

	$ VARIABLE="value"
	$ export VARIABLE

You can use /etc/make.conf to control the options used to compile software
on this system.  Example entries are in
/usr/share/examples/etc/defaults/make.conf.

To do a fast search for a file, try

	 locate filename

locate uses a database that is updated every Saturday (assuming your computer
is running FreeBSD at the time) to quickly find files based on name only.

In order to search for a string in some files, use 'grep' like this:

	 grep "string" filename1 [filename2 filename3 ...]

This will print out the lines in the files that contain the string.  grep can
also do a lot more advanced searches - type 'man grep' for details.

You can use the 'fetch' command to retrieve files over ftp or http.

	 fetch http://www.freebsd.org/index.html

will download the front page of the FreeBSD web site.

In order to make fetch (the FreeBSD downloading tool) ask for
username/password when it encounter a password-protected web page, you can set
the environment variable HTTP_AUTH to 'basic:*'.

You can permanently set environment variables for your shell by putting them
in a startup file for the shell.  The name of the startup file varies
depending on the shell - csh and tcsh uses .login, bash, sh, ksh and zsh use
.profile.  When using bash, sh, ksh or zsh, don't forget to export the
variable.

If you are running xterm, the default TERM variable will be 'xterm'.  If you
set this environment variable to 'xterm-color' instead, a lot of programs will
use colors.  You can do this by

	TERM=xterm-color; export TERM

in Bourne-derived shells, and

	setenv TERM xterm-color

in csh-derived shells.

If you do not want to get beeps in X11 (X Windows), you can turn them off with

	xset b off

You can look through a file in a nice text-based interface by typing

	less filename