Mac OS® X Tiger™ Unleashed

Understanding Tiger, HFS+, and BSD Command Interaction

To the novice Unix user—especially one coming from a GUI environment as nice as the Mac's—venturing into the Unix filesystem will probably feel like a journey back to the Stone Age. Files upon files, nothing to indicate what any of them do, and not a friendly icon in sight. Although the filesystem might initially appear cryptic and primitive, you will find that with experience, it actually affords you considerable sophistication and control. This sophistication comes from the ability to combine the functions of many small programs into larger programs with arbitrarily complex functions.

Before the use of most Unix commands will make sense, you need to understand a few things about the design ...