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Mac OS X for Unix Geeks
book

Mac OS X for Unix Geeks

by Ernest E. Rothman, Brian Jepson
September 2002
Beginner to intermediate
216 pages
7h 43m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Mac OS X for Unix Geeks

Preface

Once upon a time, Unix came with only a few standard utilities, and if you were lucky, it included a C compiler. When setting up a new Unix system, you’d have to crawl the Net looking for important software: Perl, gcc, bison, flex, less, Emacs, and other utilities and languages. That was a lot of software to download through a 28.8 kbps modem. These days, Unix distributions come with much more, and it seems like more and more users are gaining access to a wide-open pipe.

Free Linux distributions pack most of the GNU tools onto a CD-ROM, and now commercial Unix systems are catching up. IRIX includes a big selection of GNU utilities, Solaris comes with a companion CD of free software, and just about every flavor of Unix (including Mac OS X) now includes Perl. Mac OS X comes with many tools, most of which are open source and complement the tools associated with Unix.

This book serves as a bridge for Unix developers and system administrators who’ve been lured to Mac OS X because of its Unix roots. When you first launch the Terminal application, you’ll find yourself at home in a Unix shell, but like Apple’s credo—“Think Different”—you’ll soon find yourself doing things a little differently. Some of the standard Unix utilities you’ve grown accustomed to may not be there, /etc/passwd and /etc/group have been supplanted with something called NetInfo, and when it comes to developing applications, you’ll find that things like library linking and compiling have a few new twists to ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596003560Errata Page