You can make your life a bit easier by defining Unix shell aliases and environment variables and functions for Django paths and commands. They can be set e.g. in $HOME/.bash_aliases to be loaded automatically.

If you have installed Django in your site-packages, you could use something like:

DJ=/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django
DJBIN=$DJ/bin
alias djadmin='$DJBIN/django-admin.py'
djgrep() {
  grep -r --include="*.py" --include="*.html" $* $DJ
}

Then you'll be able to:

$ djadmin startproject myproject
$ $DJBIN/make-messages.py
$ less $DJ/docs/overview.txt
$ djgrep Permissions
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/contrib/auth/models.py:77:            (_('Permissions'), {'fields': ('is_staff', 'is_active', 'is_superuser', 'user_permissions')}),

Here's another example for those who don't keep their Django tree in PYTHONPATH (e.g. because of using many different Django versions). In this case the magic-removal branch is located in the user's home directory.

MRP=/home/akaihola/magic-removal  # MRP stands for Magic-Removal Pythonpath
MR=$MRP/django
MRBIN=$MR/bin
alias mradmin='PYTHONPATH=$MRP $MRBIN/django-admin.py'
mrgrep() {
  grep -r --include="*.py" --include="*.html" $* $MR
}

And some useful idioms using these shortcuts:

$ mradmin startproject myproject
$ $MRBIN/make-messages.py
$ PYTHONPATH=$MRP ipython
In [1]:import django
In [2]:django.__file__
Out[2]:'/home/akaihola/magic-removal/django/__init__.pyc'