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Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther
This book focuses on those of us in the Mac OS professional world who have become Unix system admins by default with the introduction of OS X, and could stand to have a handy UNIX reference nearby, particularly if the Finder freezes in Apple's latest version of their BSD/OpenStep blend of a UNIX operating system.
As the authors explain in the book, the best justification for understanding and using the UNIX components present is Mac OS X is the same as in any other UNIX-family operating system: power and control. The Finder (Mac OS X's graphical desktop manager) can't do everything, so this book provides information to help power users and technicians resolve issues, install software, or create an optimized experience, all through the Terminal.
Chapters 1 and 2 provide a very helpful tutorial on the Mac OS X Terminal application, from showing the benefits of customizing the Terminal, the concept of shells, UNIX command syntax, and other obscure but useful settings that strengthen the power of the application when accessing the BSD innards of Mac OS X. Arguably, these two chapters are the strongest guide on Mac OS X's Terminal application (as it relates to its UNIX roots) that I have seen in any Mac OS X book to date.
Chapters 3 and 4 handle understanding of the UNIX filesystem, administration and superuser access, privileges, handling external volumes, file and directory names and the like. Mac OS X, while a BSD at heart, doesn't map out everything in a traditional UNIX-style directory format--at least, not from the Finder's view. Through the Terminal, a user can see the underlying, otherwise-hidden UNIX directories. The authors go through some basic but very helpful situations such as changing file and owner permissions, which can be changed from the Finder with greater ease in Panther, but not with the same finesse as done from a command line.
The file management chapter moves readers through the classic commands for moving, editing, and copying files from the command line, which can be very helpful for administrators of Mac OS X systems who must attempt repairs by SSH, for instance, and don't have access to the usual graphical elements that generally make Mac OS usage so easy. The authors don't pick sides in the vi vs. pico debate, and just offer the basic instructions on how to use either for your editing.
The book continues with the same level of complexity that local system admins or power users require in issues such as printing via CUPS, handling processes that the Finder doesn't show, using the X11 application, using Fink (a Debian-style installation application) installing OpenOffice and GIMP, using FTP and secure shell, using Pine and Lynx, and more.
For a book of just 168 pages, the authors pack quite a bit on making a Mac OS X system work from its Terminal roots. New Mac OS X system administrators will find this book most useful, particularly if their UNIX experience is lacking or radically different from what Mac OS X presents. Experienced *NIX users who bought a new Mac may find the book a good intermediary to demonstrate how Mac OS X Panther differs from the *NIX boxen they've used in the past.
You can purchase Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
If you don't know what a command does, type "man [command]" (without the quotes, of course).
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I am a *nix admin and I have several friends that are OS X users that want to take advantage of the terminal/BSD side of the operating system. I am going to recommend this to all of them.
Evolution or ID?
man man
man cd
man pwd
man ls
man cp
man mv
man rm
man chmod
man more
man ps
man rm
man chmod
man more
man head
man tail
man grep
man passwd
Knock yourself out.
Using the Mac OS X Terminal (HTML) or Using the Mac OS X Terminal (PDF)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
So where is the Learning Mac OS X for the unix geek?
It just so happens it's available from O'Reilly as well. The Panther edition is due out in June.
That would be Mac OS X Panther for UNIX Geeks, listed here: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mpantherunix/
Incidentally, I had the Jaguar versions of both of these books, and found them very helpful. They're very useful, even for cross-checking each other.
Oh, and Pico rules! vi drools!
... Macolytes who have a use for the command-line can really use GeekTool to improve their quality of life. See this picture for an example of its GUI goodness.
Okay, okay, so it's sitting there just churning the CPU. But it looks cool enough to get me chicks, so I figured you guys could use it too.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
Troll? The funny thing is, this is actually true! If you've used OS X, and tried to do some fun CLI stuff like yr used to, you'll realize it. Sure, it can be fixed, but it should all work; it would if Appl would have stuck with convention instead of /Applications /Users and so on...
and neither can terminal.app! lord, it's the worst terminal program i've ever used. there are, however, some good replacements.
2 1337 4 u!
I think the taunt was moreso that win95 was just DOS with a GUI running on top of it. The fact that it had an *additional* feature in the form of a command-line wasn't the target there if I recall correctly.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
The "Rosetta Stone for Unix" may help you.
http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
Well, the thing is, Apple didn't write most of the man pages. And you'll find some little oddities -- like daemons starting up from rc that are calling flags not mentioned in the Apple supplied man pages. [eg, syslogd -s]
The real problem comes from all of those commands that apple has so kindly added and didn't bother to create man pages for. Stuff like 'disktool' and 'scselect'. Disktool gives some usage info when you call it...scselect, well...
And how many others are there out there that people haven't yet documented? [those two were mentioned in MacOS X for Unix Geeks, but I've found others that I can't recall off the top of my head that were recommended to run on webpages for configuration changes, that I just can't find documentation for]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If you have trouble configuring Apache, the Apache website doesn't help much because OS X has files in different locations.
/etc/httpd, log files are in /var/log/httpd, DocumentRoot is /Library/WebServer/Documents, and ScriptAlias /cgi-bin is /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables.
/etc/apache, log files are in /var/log/apache, DocumentRoot is /var/www/htdocs, and ScriptAlias /cgi-bin is /var/www/cgi-bin.
/etc/httpd/conf, log files are in /var/log/httpd (symlinked at /etc/httpd/logs), DocumentRoot is /var/www/htdocs, and ScriptAlias /cgi-bin is /var/www/cgi-bin.
/usr/local/apache/conf, log files are in /usr/local/apache/logs, DocumentRoot is /usr/local/apache/htdocs, and ScriptAlias /cgi-bin is /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin.
Apache's files are in different places on different flavors of UNIX or Linux distributions - and they're different still if the administrator compiled from source.
On Mac OS X 10.3, configuration files are in
On Slackware 8.1, configuration files are in
On RedHat 9, configuration files are in
By default on most systems, if you've compiled from source and haven't changed any paths, configuration files are in
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
This was on slashdot before and is a good overview:
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Try Running MacOSX, which is like a younger brother to the venerable Running Linux.
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
The O'Reilly OS X for Unix Geeks and Running Mac OS X books should help. The former is at Jaguar right now, the latter at Panther. There's also an OS X in a Nutshell.
This is unnecissarily hyperbolic. Apple's Terminal.app is fairly no-frills, but it still has some nice features, such as transforming a folder or file dropped from the Finder (or any title bar avatar) into a pathname. You can drag and copy and paste just like any other app. You can change fonts (even to non-monospace fonts). It'll emulate a number of terminals (e.g. VT-100, xterm-color, etc.) You can customize the title bar display. Set the transparency of the window itself (eye-candy). It has an unlimited scrollback buffer. It'll handle multibyte scripts (e.g. Kanji or Chinese), as well as handle a number of character encodings. It has customizable command keys.
It's leaps and bounds beyond cmd.exe. But perhaps you've had the good fortune never to have encountered that.
You really ought to check out GNU Screen, which AFAIK comes with OS X by default. Screen allows you to run a number of shells or other interactive programs in a single terminal, sort of like having tabbed interface. However, Screen gives you all kinds of extra goodies with this--you can lock your session, detach it and reattach from anywhere, monitor "tabs" for silence or activity, split the terminal between one or more tabs, and so on. Better than "tabbed" terminals by far.
there's joe, which I often find is installed on systems that don't have nano/pico.
/etc/apt/sources.list on a new Debian install ...
;))
It's not *quite* as friendly as nano/pico, but has enough similarities (and the built in status bar / help-reminder you crave) that I tend to use it when editing things like
(Of course, every UNIX system seems to have vi installed, so I wish I could remember its commands better
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Actually, the perceived slowness is just the result of the sloppy refresh rate of terminal.app, but a MUCH MUCH worse problem is the overall cpu usage for just printing some simple stuff. try the following: run mplayer to play back some divx movie, and use top -u -s5 to watch how terminal.app is eating up to 15% of cpu just to display the stupid progress/cpu-usage messages from mplayer!
now, does anyone have a more efficient terminal? maybe xterm is still the king...
still running a x86? dinosaurs do exist!