September 2008
Beginner to intermediate
426 pages
10h 42m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X For Unix Geeks, 4th EditionBecome 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,
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Chapter 3. Files and Filesystems
Apple’s Mac OS Extended filesystem, HFS+, has a lot going for it. Although its case-insensitivity caused trouble back in the very early days of Mac OS X, it is rarely a problem these days. Its transparent support of the metadata that is so crucial to Mac OS X, coupled with its excellent support for journaling, make it the filesystem of choice for the operating system today. But even if your hard disks, iPods, and external drives are all happily formatted with HFS+, chances are you’ll have to exchange files with something other than a Mac one of these days.
Note
Trouble? What kind of trouble? Here’s an example: Library for WWW in Perl (LWP), a suite of Perl modules for interacting with web servers, also includes a number of command-line utilities. One of these is named HEAD. Once upon a time, installing LWP on Mac OS X with the default options led to the command-line utilities being dropped in /usr/bin. This resulted in /usr/bin/head being overwritten with HEAD. I was surprised by how many things rely on that useful little utility. Although such mishaps are still possible today, they are less likely. LWP no longer installs HEAD by default, but you should always pay careful attention to what you’re installing, especially with older software.
Though it is not recommended for most users—even Unix geeks—you can format a filesystem as case-sensitive and journaled HFS+. You can even install Mac OS X on a case-sensitive journaled HFS+ partition, but you may ...
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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.
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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.