Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Chapter 15. Useful Unix Hints

For some, the Unix engine at the heart of Mac OS X may seem completely foreign, intimidating, and even unnecessary. To this end, you’re forgiven if the presence, in this day and age, of a command line—a system of controlling the Mac by typing cryptic commands instead of using menus—strikes you as a blast from the DOS-ridden past.

And you’d have good company. The vast majority of Mac OS X fans live long, happy lives without ever touching Terminal or even realizing that the Mac OS X sports car rides on Unix, a venerable, highly polished, 30-year-old chassis.

But an extremely important minority lives, eats, and sleeps in Terminal. This program is where the more advanced crowd of major-league geeks compiles open-source programs, connects to remote computers, and performs magic with strings of commands like grep, sed, and awk.

These people enjoy a world of power and control usually enjoyed only by dictators and Hollywood stars. They’re the people who, admiring the handsome plumbing of Mac OS X, are writing cool new programs for it, introducing it to corporations, and getting their own work done much faster.

This chapter and the next are dedicated to helping you maximize the many benefits of Terminal (which awaits in your Applications → Utilities folder). Some of the tricks are simple enough for anybody; others require some experience in Unix. All of them, however, involve Terminal.

Unix Basics

The first time you see it, you’d swear that Unix had nothing in common ...