The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
-
Italic
Used to indicate new terms, example URLs, filenames, file extensions, directories, commands and options, program names, and to highlight comments in examples. For example, a path in the filesystem appears as
/Applications/Utilities
.-
Constant Width
Used to show the contents of files or the output from commands.
-
Constant Width Bold
Used in examples and tables to show commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.
-
Constant Width Italic
Used in examples and tables to show text that should be replaced with user- supplied values.
- Menus/navigation
Menus and their options are referred to in the text as File→Open, Edit Copy, etc. Arrows are also used to signify a navigation path when using window options. For example, “System Preferences→Desktop & Screen SaverScreen Saver” means that you would launch System Preferences, click the icon for the “Desktop & Screen Saver” preference panel, and then select the “Screen Saver” pane within that panel.
- Pathnames
Pathnames are used to show the location of a file or application in the file-system. Directories (or folders for Mac and Windows users) are separated by a forward slash. For example, if you see something like, “. . . launch the Terminal application (
/Applications/Utilities
)” in the text, this means the Terminal application can be found in the Utilities subfolder of the Applications folder.The tilde character (
~
) refers to the current user’s Home folder, so~/Library
refers to the Library folder within your own Home folder.-
[RETURN]
[RETURN]
at the end of a line of code denotes an unnatural line break; that is, you should not enter these as two lines of code, but as one continuous line. Multiple lines are used in these cases due to printing constraints.-
$
,#
The dollar sign (
$
) is used in some examples to show the user prompt for thebash
shell; the hash mark (#
) is the prompt for theroot
user.- Menu symbols
When looking at the menus for any application, you will see some symbols associated with keyboard shortcuts for a particular command. For example, to open a document in Microsoft Word, you can go to the File menu and select Open (File→Open), or you can issue the keyboard shortcut, -O.
Figure P-2 shows the symbols used in the various menus to denote a keyboard shortcut.
Rarely will you see the Control symbol used as a menu command option;
it’s more often used in association with mouse
clicks or for working with the bash
shell.
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