3 The Mac OS X Utilities

In This Chapter

Special Characters

Basic Utilities

less: Displays a Text File One Screen at a Time

Working with Files

lpr: Prints a File

| (Pipe): Communicates Between Processes

Compressing and Archiving Files

Locating Commands

apropos: Searches for a Keyword

Obtaining User and System Information

When the first UNIX systems were introduced, and for a long time thereafter, UNIX did not have a graphical interface: It ran on character-based terminals only. All the tools ran from the command line. The Mac OS X GUI is important, of course, but many people—especially system administrators—run many command line programs. In a lot of cases, command line utilities are faster, more powerful, or more complete than their GUI counterparts. ...

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