Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Chapter 16. Intermediate Unix Hints

Chapter 15 describes some basic hints for working directly with the Unix foundations of Mac OS X. In this chapter, the hints are more advanced—sometimes very advanced—and assume more Terminal experience. In fact, the technical level of these hints may approach nosebleed territory for the Unix novice.

This chapter is for people who:

• Are comfortable in Terminal and possess a strong working knowledge of commands like ls, mv, cp, cd, and sudo (all of which are described in Chapter 15).

• Can create a new file from scratch using a text editor, like pico, vi, or emacs, add data to the file, save it, and then quit the editor (Sidebar 15.4).

• Can open a file in a text editor (given only the file’s name and path) and insert or delete lines in it (Sidebar 15.4).

• Understand the concept of paths and placing programs in your path settings to ensure that the shell can execute them.

• Understand the location and use of .bash_profile, /etc/profile, and the other related configuration files for the bash shell (Sidebar 15.3).

Many of these hints explain how to add stuff to the Unix side of your system—new utilities packages, scripts to accomplish certain tasks, a Web log analysis package, and even a package for running a Web forum.

Note

You’re not expected to retype all of the various scripts and commands described in this chapter. At http://www.macosxhints.com/book/103scripts.html, you can download a tidy text file that contains all of these commands and scripts already typed, ...