September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
16h 1m
English
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Terminal Shortcuts
The hints in this first batch are so safe and easy, you’ll wonder why anyone ever used “Terminal” and “intimidating” in the same sentence.
Note
Many of the hints in this chapter work only if your Mac OS X installation includes the software chunk known as the BSD Subsystem. The only reason you wouldn’t have that is if you explicitly turned its checkbox off when you installed Mac OS X.
Say Hello to Your New Shell: bash
In Panther, Apple changed how you approach the Unix part of the system. Previous versions of Mac OS X used the tcsh shell as the default shell (Sidebar 15.1); this was the shell that opened in Terminal the first time you launched it. With Panther, Apple changed to the bash shell.
Many Mac OS X veterans had become familiar with tcsh, and didn’t necessarily want things to change. Fortunately for them, if they upgraded a previous version of Mac OS X to Panther, they didn’t see a difference: Terminal still used the shell they had before. However, when you create a new account under Panther, or if you perform a clean install, Mac OS X automatically sets bash as your default shell.
Unless specified, all the hints in this and the following chapter assume that you’re using bash. If you are still using tcsh, or another shell, most of them will work just fine. However, you’ll need to use different configuration files for any hints that tell you to change settings, aliases, or variables.
If you need to know which files to edit, just type man shell (where shell is ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.