September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
16h 1m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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.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.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.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.
Administering the Mac
The Unix shell can help you keep a close eye on the performance of your Mac—in ways that no graphical Mac OS X program can. For example, did you know you can pause an application that’s running in the background so that it won’t take any of your processor cycles while you’re not using it? After reading this section, you’ll know how to do that and much more.
Your Mac’s True Unix Heritage
During the normal boot-up sequence for Mac OS X, you see a gray logo in the middle of the screen with a spinning progress wheel just below it. Hey, that’s all well and good from a cute icon standpoint. But if you ever want to see what really happens when your machine boots up, hold down
-V just after you press the power button or the reset switch. This key combo, known in Geekville as verbose mode booting, reveals all the underlying Unix processes at work.
Some ugly white text on the black background shows you exactly what Unix is doing to boot your machine. The messages flicker by very quickly while the computer starts up, but you can still read them once it’s finished. (Unfortunately, the messages aren’t likely to make any more sense when you can actually read them.) If you’re curious to see what happened when your computer started up, launch Terminal and type dmesg | less. (The less command makes the long dmesg results scroll one page at a time.)
Log Files in Real Time
Enough of ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
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.