1. Create a folder .fonts in your $HOME directory.
2. Download fonts of your choice (ttf or otf format to ~/.fonts).
3. Refresh the fonts cache with fc-cache -fv.
4. You can verify if your custom fonts got added to the cache using fc-list. For example, I would do fc-list -f "%{family}\n" | sort -u | grep 'Inconsolata'¹ to check if my downloaded Inconsolata fonts got into the font cache.
5. Add the below .Xdefaults snippet to your ~/.Xdefaults
6. Add xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xdefaults to your shell init script. My shell init script is ~/.alias.

*customization: -color
XTerm*termName: xterm-256color

xterm*saveLines:        500
xterm*scrollBar:        false
xterm*cursorColor:      white
xterm*pointerColor:     white
xterm*Foreground:       white
xterm*Background:       black
xterm*c132:             true
xterm*loginShell:       false

! Fonts
! XTerm*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono:size=11
! XTerm*faceName: Inconsolata:size=11
! XTerm*faceName: Inconsolata\\-dz:style=dz:size=11
XTerm*faceName: Inconsolata\\-g:style=g:size=11

Done! Now source your shell init script and launch xterm.

Note: In order to use font names with hyphens in them, I had to escape them by using \\. So for the Inconsolata-g font, I have XTerm*faceName: Inconsolata\\-g:style=g:size=11.

It might be helpful to add the below aliases to your tcsh init script for quick font refresh and check, using fontsrefresh; fontsavail | grep 'Inconsolata'.

alias fontsavail   'fc-list -f "%{family}\n" | sort -u'
alias fontsrefresh 'fc-cache -fv'

Hi
How
Hi
Are
Hi
You?
Are

Here’s how we can remove the duplicate lines using awk ..

echo "Hi\nHow\nHi\nAre\nHi\nYou?\nAre" |  awk '\!x[$0]++'

The above will give this output:

Hi
How
Are
You?

The escape char \ is required for ! in tcsh.

This is how that awk snippet works:

• Initially the x array will be empty.
• When $0 is Hi, x[$0]=x[Hi]=0. So !x[Hi] will be True and it will be printed out.
• After that the x[Hi] becomes 1 because of the ++ increment operator.
• Next time when $0==Hi, as x[Hi]==1, !x[Hi] will be False and so $0 won’t be printed out.

This is the most common way of my sed usage:

echo [SOMETHING] | sed 's/old/NEW/g'

Based on that, I have this tcsh alias¹ to get timestamps that I use to append to quick tar backups.

alias gettimestamp 'date | tr " :" "__" | sed '"'"'s/_[0-9]*_EDT.*//g'"'"''

Learn about sed from [here][s1].

Here’s how I solve that problem.

If you have an alias alias test 'echo \!:1*' and if you run test abc def, you will get the output abc def.

!:1* prints out all the arguments starting from argument 1 till the last where even argument 1 is optional. If that argument doesn’t exist, the variable will be assigned a null value.

But tcsh will not complain about it – the * after !:1 is the beauty. On the other hand, if I have an alias alias test2 'echo \!:1', and if I run test – with zero arguments – tcsh will give an error.

So extending that, I have the below alias defined to grab an argument of any index.

alias opt_args 'set arg1 = `echo \!:1* | awk '"'"'{ print $1 }'"'"'`; \\
                echo -n "Arg num 1 = $arg1 "; \\
                set arg2 = `echo \!:2* | awk '"'"'{ print $1 }'"'"'`; \\
                echo -n "Arg num 2 = $arg2 "; \\
                set arg3 = `echo \!:3* | awk '"'"'{ print $1 }'"'"'`; \\
                echo -n "Arg num 3 = $arg3 "; \\
                echo ""; \\
               '

You can test this alias by running these commands:

opt_args abc
opt_args abc def
opt_args abc def ghi
opt_args abc def ghi jkl

I wanted to set an alias for a find command containing the -regex switch. For simplicity I will use this example:

find . -type f -regex '.*\.txt$'

This expression simply gives a list of all *.txt files in any directory under the current path.

The above command works fine when running in the terminal, but when saving that to a tcsh alias, that $ needs to be escaped:

alias findtxt "find . -type f -regex '.*txt'\"\$"''"

A simple $ has to be written as '\"\$"'!!!

Granted that I will usually get the same result if I did alias findtxt "find . -type f -regex '.*txt'" instead. But this turned out to be an interesting exercise on how to escape a $.

Reference