December 2005
Intermediate to advanced
400 pages
11h 33m
English
Content preview from Running Mac OS X TigerBecome 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 4. The Terminal and Shell
The Terminal
application (/Applications/Utilities) is the portal to the internals of Mac OS X. You can use—and become proficient with—the operating system without ever touching the Terminal. But if you truly want to dig deep and learn how to unleash the full potential of the underlying Unix capabilities of the system, the command line is essential. And once you know how to use it, the Terminal becomes a tool so valuable that many power users keep it in their Dock or in the Finder’s Sidebar for quick access.
Tempting as it may be to think of the Terminal as the Unix part of Mac OS X, it’s simply an interface to the underlying Unix operating system, and specifically to those programs that give the system its Unix character.
This chapter makes the assumption that you have at least a passing familiarity with the idea of the command line. Maybe you remember using a shared system at a school somewhere. Or maybe you had a DOS-based machine that required you to go sleuthing into the depths of the C:\ world. In any case, the aim of this chapter is to familiarize you with the Terminal, the shell, and some of the other tools you’ll need through the rest of the book.
Tip
If this chapter goes over your head and you need more of a grounding on the subject, you should pick up Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger, by David Taylor (O’Reilly).
Terminal Overview
When you launch the Terminal application, shown in Figure 4-1, you are greeted with a single, rather plain-looking ...
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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.
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.