Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Logging Out, Shutting Down

If you’re the only person who uses your Mac, finishing up a work session is simple. You can either turn off the machine or simply let it go to sleep, in any of several ways.

Sleep Mode

Apple clearly expects its customers not to shut down their machines between sessions; the company has gone to great lengths to make doing so inconvenient. (For example, pressing the Power button on most Mac models no longer offers you the option to shut down.)

That’s OK. Sleep mode consumes very little power, keeps everything you were doing open and available, and wakes up almost immediately when you press a key or click the mouse. To make your machine sleep:

• Choose

  

  →Sleep.

• Press Control-Eject (or Control-F12, if you don’t have an Eject key). In the dialog box shown in Figure 1-21, click Sleep (or type S).

• Press the Power button on your machine. On many current models, doing so makes it sleep immediately.

• Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver system preference described in Section 8.10 will send the machine off to dreamland automatically at the specified time.

The Go to Folder Command

Sometimes a Unix tentacle pokes through the user-friendly Aqua interface. Every now and then, you find a place where you can use Unix shortcuts instead of the mouse.

One classic example is the Go→Go to Folder command (Shift-

-G; the keystroke changed Mac in OS X 10.2). It brings up a box like the one shown here.

The purpose of this box is to let you jump to a certain folder on your Mac directly by typing its Unix folder path. Depending on your point of view, this special box is either a shortcut or a detour.

For example, if you want to see what’s in the Documents folder of your Home folder, you could choose Go→Go to Folder, type this:

/Users/mjones/Documents

Then click Go or press Return. (In this example, of course, mjones is your short account name.)

In other words, you’re telling the Mac to open the Users folder in your main hard drive window, then your Home folder inside that, and then the Documents folder inside that. Each slash means, “and then open.” (Leaving off the name of your hard drive is optional.) When you press Enter, the folder you specified pops open immediately.

Of course, if you really wanted to jump to your Documents folder, you’d be wasting your time by typing all that. Unix (and therefore Mac OS X) offers a handy shortcut that means, “home folder.” It’s the tilde character (~) at the upper-left corner of your keyboard.

To see what’s in your Home folder, then, you could type just that ~ symbol into the Go To box and then press Return. Or you could add some slashes to it to specify a folder inside your Home folder, like this:

~/Documents

You can even jump to someone else’s Home folder by typing a name after the symbol, like this:

~chris

If you get into this sort of thing, here’s another shortcut worth noting: If you type nothing but a slash (/) and then press Return, you jump immediately to the Computer window, which provides an overview of all your disks, plus a Network icon.

Note, too, that you don’t have to type out the full path—only the part that drills down from the window you’re in. If your Home folder window is already open, for example, you can open the Pictures folder just by typing Pictures.

But the Go to Folder trick really turns into a high-octane time-saver if you use tab completion. Here’s how it works: After each slash, you can type only enough letters of a folder’s name to give Mac OS X the idea—de instead of desktop, for example—and then press the Tab key. Mac OS X instantly and automatically fills in the rest of the folder’s name.

For example, instead of typing /applications/Microsoft Office X/clipart/standard, you could type nothing more than /ap/mi/cl/st, remembering to press Tab after each pair of letters. Now that’s a way to feel like a Unix programmer!

Restart

You shouldn’t have to restart the Mac very often—only in times of severe troubleshooting mystification, in fact. Here are a few ways to do it:

• Choose

  

  →Restart. A confirmation dialog box appears; click Restart (or press Enter).

  Note

  If you press Option as you release the mouse on the

  

  →Restart command, you won’t be bothered by an “Are you sure?” confirmation box.

• Press Control-

  

  -Eject. (If you don’t have an Eject key, substitute F12.)

• Press Control-Eject to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-21; click Restart (or type R).

Figure 1-21. Once the Shut Down dialog box appears, you can press the S key instead of clicking Sleep, R for Restart, Esc for Cancel, or Enter for Shut Down.

Shut Down

To shut down your machine completely (when you don’t plan to use it for more than a couple of days, when you plan to transport it, and so on), do one of these:

• Choose

  

  →Shut Down. A simple confirmation dialog box appears; click Shut Down (or press Enter).

  Note

  Once again, if you press Option as you release the mouse on the

  

  →Shut Down command, no confirmation box will appear.

• Press Control-Option-

  

  -Eject. (It’s not as complex as it looks—the first three keys are all in a tidy row to the left of the Space bar.)

• Press Control-Eject (or Control-F12) to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-21. Click Shut Down (or press Enter).

Log Out

If you share your Mac, you should log out when you’re done. Doing so ensures that your stuff is safe from the evil and the clueless even when you’re out of the room. To do it, choose

→Log Out (or press Shift-

-Q). When the confirmation dialog box appears, click Log Out (or press Enter), or just wait for two minutes. The Mac hides your world from view and displays the Sign In dialog box, ready for the next victim.

Note

Last time: If you press Option as you release the mouse on the

→Log Out command, you squelch the “Are you sure?” box.

Logging out is described in much more detail in Chapter 11.