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Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther
You can do a tremendous amount of stuff in Mac OS X Panther without ever touching the command line. This includes editing files, transferring them to remote locations, running a web server, and writing programs. Legend has it that some Apple developers wanted to ship OS X without a command-line application because it's anathema to the Mac "experience." But as Unix geeks will tell you, there are tasks which are much better suited to the command line. Routine, repeated, and automated tasks are some, as well as quick-and-easy access to files and directories.
This book is for the skilled Mac user who would like to know a little more about the operating system behind the scenes. There's also information about the Mac's brand of Unix, so someone familiar with Unix but new to the Mac will also find stuff to learn. For those confident in their Mac and Unix skills, however, there's not much new in the book's 168 pages. That's not to say it's a bad book; I found it quite enjoyable to read, and it's a good title to keep in mind to recommend to a Unix novice.
The book begins with an introduction to Terminal.app, the Mac's Unix terminal program. From the very basic (how to find with the Finder) to the fun (how to change the text and background colors) to the useful (how to save terminal sessions into double-clickable .term files), there's much that Terminal has to offer. There's even the cryptic echo '^[]2;My-Window-Title^G' command to change the title of Terminal's window.
The authors then introduce a few simple commands like date and who, and show how to manipulate the terminal's prompt. There's also alias which creates command shortcuts. For instance, if you always run ls with the -F flag, a command alias ls "ls -F" will save you some typing.
Each chapter has two sections which stand out. The "Practice" section gives a list of exercises to try, and the "Problem Checklist" is there to diagnose and fix unexpected behavior.
It's important (especially for those used to other OSes) to understand that in Unix, everything is a file, and all files are organized in the filesystem. This includes plain files, which might be Word documents or system logs; directories, which break up the filesystem into a tree; links, which allow file reuse with different names; devices, drives, etc. All these building blocks of the operating system are discussed. There are also a few pages on vi (which I found quite useful as my vi knowledge up to that point consisted of :q!.) and pico.
Printing on Mac OS X is much like printing on any Unix operating system; you can use pr to format text for line printing, enscript to format for PostScript printing, and lpr to actually queue a printer job. The addition that the Mac provides is a CLI to AppleTalk printers. You can use at_cho_prn to choose an AppleTalk printer and atprint to print to one.
One of Unix's biggest features is its ability to put together small programs to do many different tasks. To count how many files under your home directory are named foo, you can do find ~ -type f -name "foo" | wc -l. By breaking down a problem into components, you only need one-counting program, one file-finding program, etc. The book has a good chapter on this input/output redirection, and how to use those magic top-row characters |, >, >>, and <. Grep (and some light regular expressions) and sort are mentioned as tools for examining text. I thought sed would make a nice addition to this chapter, but perhaps it would lengthen the book too much.
Another advantage of Unix is its true multitasking. What may surprise newcomers to the command-line is that it is possible to run many jobs at once with a single interface. By running commands in the background, one can start large jobs and do other tasks while waiting. In the chapter on multitasking, the & modifier is covered, along with fg, bg, and kill to manipulate processes, and ps and top to report on them.
The command-line interface is lightweight enough that it can easily be extended by a network. This means it's easy (in fact, commonplace) to control a computer different from the one in front of which you're sitting. The authors cover the remote-shell commands ssh and its non-secure cousins, as well as other tools for accessing the internet such as ftp and curl.
The book closes with an introduction to the wealth of open-source software available for Macintosh, now that Macs run a functional Unix. The graphical Unix applications require an X server, which is easy to download and install. The authors show how to install Fink, the Macintosh open-source package manager, and a few big applications like OpenOffice.org and The Gimp.
The last chapter is both a resource list and suggestions for further directions. Those who learn a lot from this book may be interested in picking up shell programming or a scripting language such as Perl.
As I said at the beginning, the book is basic and well-written. Even if you feel it's beneath you, keep the title in mind when a newbie asks what the command-line is all about.
Matthew Leingang is a Preceptor in Mathematics at Harvard University. A funny sentence in the third person escapes him at the moment. 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.
Think: do you know how to count the words in a Word file?
Tools -> Word Count
Why is that so hard? It's File -> Properties -> Statistics in OpenOffice.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
In an old paper by Ritchie, it is pointed out that Unix comes from the Old Dutch, Unochs, which means "tree-based".
Just the other day I was fixing a friend's mac, and while I hadn't used OSX all that much, I do use linux, so I asked him, "okay, open up a terminal" because I knew it was possible, and it was so nice to be able to use (just about) everything I could in linux. It's definately something I wish Windows had...
"!"
Yea, the big freaking button with "i" in a circle right in the middle of toobar. It will tell you characters, words, lines and pages. Even easier and faster to use than wc.
Did you know that the number of words in a document is not a single value, but depends on the use of the document? I'm sure that Stephenson does know that: if you're writing for some audiences, you don't count the words in foot- or endnotes, whereas for others, you do. If you're writing for some audiences, you don't count "short words", whereas for others, you do.
And, of course, if you're writing in Japanese, wc counts your entire document as being one word long.
What does this have to do with Unix? It's a classic example of Einstein's dictum that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. The Unix command wc is a classic exmple.
I have used Unix, Linux and Windows for years. I recently switched to Mac at home.
I find it uncomfortable for obvious reasons (new way of doing things). Yet, while I only do file movement, touches, etc via the command line in unix/linux, and I only do GUI file touches, movement, etc on Windows, I find myself using an unwieldy GUI (Finder) to do the same thing on Mac. I can fire up an xterm and do it that way, but I don't 'want' to.
That is odd for me. Can't quite explain it. Mac is (even as a unix variant) its own creature. It leaves me feeling like I have the power of the universe in a little pretty living space.
Maybe cause I am new to it still.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
I recently got an iBook (recently as in 6 months ago) after installing a G5 for a user in our art department. I'm not sure I'm a big fan of Apple's hardware or pricing schemes ($600 for an iPod that plays photos), but Mac OS X is pretty robust.
What I especially like about their use of the Terminal is pretty much anything that can be done in the OS, can be done on the command line. Example: changing a computer's name. Think fast: how does one do this in Windows? If you started saying "command line, net with options..." you know more than most. Windows coerces you to use the GUI. Mac encourages it, but doesn't force it (at least, since they got rid of OS 9).
Not to mention the Fink project, which adds tons of great apps to the command line. Again, I'm no Apple zealot, but their decision to have a robust command line in OS X was a great one.
For my current document, it reads:
Statistics:
Pages 23
Words 10,234
Characters (no spaces) 52,996
Characters (with spaces) 63,140
Paragraphs 107
Lines 660
One of the really nice things about GUI's is that they make rarely used commands (like word count) really easy to discover. You just look in the menu, and there it is. Compare that to a UNIX command prompt, where if you don't know how to write scripts and you don't know that the "wc" command is for word counts, you are lost.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
grep -v -c "Something I know is not in the file" file.txt
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
I see how this works now. If you only answered with the MS way you get modded 0 but if you used the OO answer or a combination of MS and OO you get modded higher.
There's no GUI analogue, perhaps because anybody tempted to make one would add too many "features" that cluttered its ease of use. Think: do you know how to count the words in a Word file?
Tools -> Word Count
Yes, Word could be considered to be wc with too many other "features"!
As I am considering the advanced Unix users that browse this forum, I'd suggest having a look at that book too/instead.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Do I know how to count characters in a word document? Certainly. And, best of all, it will actually count characters, in any character set, not just in ASCII or other similar 7/8 bit sets.
But that's not really the point. Knowing how to do something in one OS does not make the one you are ignorant about an inferior OS. If you truly do know both OSes, then I'll listen to your opinions. Until then, I'd stay away from making comparisons.
It is the height of arrogance to assume that if you don't know something that it must not exist.
A robust programmable command line is a great tool, but for completely different reasons than listed.
It's powerful because you can create intelligent scripts to automate tasks. Then you launch those scripts by clicking them.
You aren't going to win anyone over by typing in some esoteric "find ~ blah | fart pipe * & (! exemo!'" command, when you could have just opened the search box and typed "foo". You're just going to look like an elitest dick.
Once upon a time, I knew all those stupid commands and switches and would pipe output through 98 different little apps to find something out.
Now I'm happy as a clam to spend my time and energy doing other things with my computer.
This summary, at least, is all about "using a command line to make simple tasks harder so that you can feel like a real 1337 h4z0r everytime you do something so mundane as count the words in a file"
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The fact that Neal Stephenson, the commentator, and the person who accepted the article were able to write and read so much about the subject without ever noticing all the obvious and commonly used GUI counterparts to wc -- many of which are considerably more interesting, for instance Word does a little morphological analysis to count Japanese words -- says something desperately sad about those people and perhaps about the culture they are from.
But the fact that so many slashdotters stepped up already and cared enough about nitpicking the record straight that they have posted the path to the word count tool in Word at least half a dozen times already, fills me with hope!
I feel as if I have gained wisdom from this simultaneous despair and revival. The feeling is probably false, though.
Incidentally, the finest and most satisfying way to count words (if wc's answer is good enough) is to use wc... from vim.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Already I'm seeing in the posts exactly what and why CLI users throw up their hands trying to deal with GUI.... and "wc" is a pretty good example. When the OP asked Think: do you know how to count the words in a Word file?, I knew without even reading on in the posts I was going to encounter (and, I did):
For those who didn't bother to sign up for the clue, the question was mostly rhetorical, and was an example of the diff between CLI and GUI. I know my immediate response wasn't, "I know EXACTLY how to do that in word," but rather, "Hmmmmm, I know I've solved that and found that "option" SOMEWHERE in word before, but I don't remember exactly where..."
OTOH, were you to ask CLI users the same question.... they would all know exactly how to use wc, and interestingly enough, had you asked the same question to the CLI users over the past fifteen years you would have gotten the same answers. So, in addition to a simple answer, CLI is a consistent one.
P.S.And don't even get me started about the menus with chevrons! Assuming for the sake of argument we are talking about the current version of WORD, have YOU ever tried to walk someone through this kind of stuff over the phone? With MS' genius implementation of self-modifying menus, you could "claim" something is in a menu when trying to help someone when in fact because of their use menus, their menu is completely different from yours.
Having one large, all-purpose tool is better because instead of having to learn many simple tools with different syntax and stringing them all together in a massive chain of fork()'s and file handles, we can use a single tool that is more sophisticated, more consistent, and more resource efficient for big tasks. As Rob Pike said in his interview here so recently, the days of one tool doing one job well "are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
There are definitely speed advantages to command lines.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Guys,
The default install of Word 2004 for Mac always shows the word count, in the lower right hand corner. It shows it as XXX/YYY, where XXX is how many words are before the cursor, and YYY is for the entire document.
As a professional writer, I can't imagine what wc would offer me that would be better than that! I often work on very specific total word targets for articles, so I can track if I'm under or (much more likely) over, and tweak accordingly.
Personally, I haven't been able to use Word on Windows since they started putting the icons in the wrong place in the menus. The PowerBook 17" is the ideal writing machine today, in my opinion.
My video compression blog
Word: I don't know how to word count. I can either trawl the menus (Hmm, "Tools" looks possible- gee, option 4 is Word Count- maybe that works) or click Help and type word count and get the #1 option: How to count words. Farking trivial for poo-flinging chimp, perhaps less so for a typical user but having worked help desk, I've never gotten a call about this. I get a nice list of pages, words, characters, paragraphs, etc.
Unix. Well, gurus know wc. If not, how do I find out about it? Perhaps I actually know the "man -k" command. Let's try "man -k word count"- hmm, ~8 pages scroll by. I'm a really smart unix user: "man -k word count |more". Let's look at the entries
#1- BN_add_word (3ssl) - arithmetic functions on BIGNUMS with integers. Hmm- fuck no. (Omitting much BN badness)
#8- EVP_BytesToKey (3ssl) - password based encryption routine. What the hell? I just want to count words, damnit.
4 screens later, I actually find wc- maybe that will work.
"wc myfile.txt". (And it had better be ASCII text- don't try feeding wc a file in Japanese. Or an HTML file for that matter: Word correctly counts the actual text without the tags, wc won't) "1624 2282 53168 myfile.txt" Ok, which number do I care about? "man wc" Hmm- probably the second. But hey- it's scriptable. That means it's better, right?
Witness the amazing power of the command line: I can dick around for five minutes trying to figure out what command to use and end up with one vastly inferior for almost all tasks compared to the GUI version.
I love command lines, I really do. (I have to- I admin a couple of Unix boxes) But people vastly underestimate how powerful GUI tools have gotten and how long it takes to learn the arcane syntax of a typical Unix shell.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
It's even easier in MS Office v. X ( and we are talking about OS X, right?), it's in the freaking status bar, right next to page count and line count. I don't even have to use the mouse or the keyboard.
This is embarrassing.
I've been gleefully using the word counts in MS Word since the early 90's. There are actually two places you can get at them, and they're both readily accessible.
Speaking of the early 90's, this reminds me of a conversation I had on a TeX mailing list around 1994. I was thrilled with the idea behind TeX and struggling with the implementation. In the course of getting some answers about the surprisingly difficult process of setting up columns of varying widths, I overheard a conversation in which some TeX zealot was meandering on about all the things Word couldn't do. The problem was that all of the things he was talking about were things Word could do. He simply never got familiar enough with the application to actually use it well.
Word has its problems, it is true. It has a number of bugs that may or may not be a problem, depending on which features you use. Recent versions have become lumbering resource hogs without adding much new functionality. It lacks some expert layout features that would enable it to fully close the gap with real document layout software, though it's good enough 90% of the time. It's owned by Microsoft. It is, however, probably the most comprehensive and full-featured word processor out there. OpenOffice.org is getting very close, owing more to stagnant development at Microsoft than anything else, and may overtake it soon. I've started using it for complex documents and, most of the time, I don't miss Word.
You see the reverse with GIMP advocates. The claim that GIMP is as good as Photoshop can only be made by people who don't know Photoshop very well and whose graphic output is mostly limited to web pages. GIMP isn't even close to Photoshop, and as opposed to the situation with Word and Microsoft, Adobe lavishes so much developer resources on Photoshop that the gap is actually growing.
To return to the original topic, yes, wc is a handy utility. But it is really much more useful for data manipulation by programmers and other IT professionals than for anything else. And if you want to enlighten people about the virtues of commandline tools -- and they are indeed legion -- it helps if you don't immediately discredit yourself by discussing applications that you understand only very superficially.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
To get things started, I whipped one up with 15 lines of applescript. For those too lazy to open up AppleScript Editor I posted a 'compiled' version.
Just add extract and toss on your desktop or in your dock: drop files on to see the wc magic. Source code follows:I know you were half-joking, but when it's so easy, why not?I always use it to find how many files are in a directory (ls -R | wc -l) or how many Windows boxes are trying to root me (cat /var/log/httpd/access_log | grep cmd.exe | wc -l) or how many visitors I got from a Slashdot story (cat access_log| grep slashdot | wc -l) or how many files I've touched this year (ls -lR | grep 2004| wc -l) or...
." and a Finder window of the current directory will open. I can access the clipboard with "pbcopy" and "pbpaste" (though I must occasionally make a temp file and use 'tr' to change from Mac line breaks to unix line breaks). The final hurdle--dealing with two-part Mac files at the command line--will be solved in 10.4.
What I'm saying is, people who complain about the "how many ways do you know to count words?" example are missing the forest for the trees. 'wc' is one of countless small UNIX utilities that I sting together in new combinations ever every day. I don't write books or magazines, so I *never* care how long my files are in that sense. But seeing how many lines in a log file contain a certain string is useful every day.
Besides, "In the Beginning..." was written back in 1998 or 1999.
Beyond WC: The coolest things about unix in OS X is the interaction with the GUI. I can type "scp " and then drag a file from the desktop into the Terminal window and then finish with the destination server and path. I can be anywhere in the filesystem and say "open
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Taking all that into account, I'm not sure what your point is. Maybe you were just trolling, but someone must not have thought so, since you were modded insightful.
find . -type f | xargs foo
to
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 foo
For a good laugh, try explaining why that is necessary to a Unix newbie!
Has Vigor been ported to the Mac? I for one could use an animated assistant when I'm working with VI.
heheh - just look how many of you just openly admitted to having Word installed on your machines. Jesus! And you call yourselves slashdotters...
[it's a joke son, move along]