Mac OS X Leopard Phrasebook

Chapter 4. Basic Unix Commands

This chapter discusses the fundamental commands that you use in everyday computing at the Unix shell—the commands that give you the mobility and visibility in plain text that you’re used to in the rich graphics of the Finder and the Aqua layer. These are the commands that let you list files, move from folder to folder, examine files’ characteristics, create folders, move and copy files around, and—perhaps most important—find out more about what these commands can do if you give them the right options.

Unix might seem impenetrable at first, defying your accustomed mouse-and-menu computing skills; but with these basic commands at your disposal, it’ll soon turn into a degree of freedom that you’ll wonder how you ever ...