Slashdot Log In
Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther
from the twisty-little-passages dept.
| Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther | |
| author | Dave Taylor and Brian Jepson |
| pages | 168 |
| publisher | O'Reilly Publishing |
| rating | 8 |
| reviewer | Kevin Spencer |
| ISBN | 0596006179 |
| summary | Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther is a good tool for those who are generally comfortable with the original Mac OS or Mac OS X, but not the Unix command line. Most of the content would not interest the traditional programmer, Linux, BSD, or other UNIX jockey, however. The Finder can't do it all, and it's a good idea to realize that today's Mac OS has more ways to force it to work than its original version. This 3rd edition of the book has a better audience focus than previous editions. |
This book focuses on those of us in the Mac OS professional world who have become Unix system admins by default with the introduction of OS X, and could stand to have a handy UNIX reference nearby, particularly if the Finder freezes in Apple's latest version of their BSD/OpenStep blend of a UNIX operating system.
As the authors explain in the book, the best justification for understanding and using the UNIX components present is Mac OS X is the same as in any other UNIX-family operating system: power and control. The Finder (Mac OS X's graphical desktop manager) can't do everything, so this book provides information to help power users and technicians resolve issues, install software, or create an optimized experience, all through the Terminal.
Chapters 1 and 2 provide a very helpful tutorial on the Mac OS X Terminal application, from showing the benefits of customizing the Terminal, the concept of shells, UNIX command syntax, and other obscure but useful settings that strengthen the power of the application when accessing the BSD innards of Mac OS X. Arguably, these two chapters are the strongest guide on Mac OS X's Terminal application (as it relates to its UNIX roots) that I have seen in any Mac OS X book to date.
Chapters 3 and 4 handle understanding of the UNIX filesystem, administration and superuser access, privileges, handling external volumes, file and directory names and the like. Mac OS X, while a BSD at heart, doesn't map out everything in a traditional UNIX-style directory format--at least, not from the Finder's view. Through the Terminal, a user can see the underlying, otherwise-hidden UNIX directories. The authors go through some basic but very helpful situations such as changing file and owner permissions, which can be changed from the Finder with greater ease in Panther, but not with the same finesse as done from a command line.
The file management chapter moves readers through the classic commands for moving, editing, and copying files from the command line, which can be very helpful for administrators of Mac OS X systems who must attempt repairs by SSH, for instance, and don't have access to the usual graphical elements that generally make Mac OS usage so easy. The authors don't pick sides in the vi vs. pico debate, and just offer the basic instructions on how to use either for your editing.
The book continues with the same level of complexity that local system admins or power users require in issues such as printing via CUPS, handling processes that the Finder doesn't show, using the X11 application, using Fink (a Debian-style installation application) installing OpenOffice and GIMP, using FTP and secure shell, using Pine and Lynx, and more.
For a book of just 168 pages, the authors pack quite a bit on making a Mac OS X system work from its Terminal roots. New Mac OS X system administrators will find this book most useful, particularly if their UNIX experience is lacking or radically different from what Mac OS X presents. Experienced *NIX users who bought a new Mac may find the book a good intermediary to demonstrate how Mac OS X Panther differs from the *NIX boxen they've used in the past.
You can purchase Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The Finder (Score:5, Funny)
"Yes it can."
-Steve Jobs
Re:The Finder (Score:5, Informative)
(http://frymaster.ca/ | Last Journal: Monday September 15 2003, @12:58AM)
and neither can terminal.app! lord, it's the worst terminal program i've ever used. there are, however, some good replacements.
Re:The Finder (Score:5, Informative)
This is unnecissarily hyperbolic. Apple's Terminal.app is fairly no-frills, but it still has some nice features, such as transforming a folder or file dropped from the Finder (or any title bar avatar) into a pathname. You can drag and copy and paste just like any other app. You can change fonts (even to non-monospace fonts). It'll emulate a number of terminals (e.g. VT-100, xterm-color, etc.) You can customize the title bar display. Set the transparency of the window itself (eye-candy). It has an unlimited scrollback buffer. It'll handle multibyte scripts (e.g. Kanji or Chinese), as well as handle a number of character encodings. It has customizable command keys.
It's leaps and bounds beyond cmd.exe. But perhaps you've had the good fortune never to have encountered that.
Apple already provides an excellent tool (Score:3, Informative)
(http://127.0.0.1/)
If you don't know what a command does, type "man [command]" (without the quotes, of course).
Re:Apple already provides an excellent tool (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.edalytical.com/)
Re:Apple already provides an excellent tool (Score:5, Funny)
man finger
man touch
man slurp
man unzip
I find it best to unzip first.
very useful (Score:2, Informative)
(http://millahtime.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday July 15 2005, @01:00PM)
Re:very useful (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Uh, sure it does. Go to File->New Project then scroll down and choose Standard Tool. Boom, a project is all set up for you to build a basic C-based command-line tool. You can also choose C++ Tool, CoreFoundation Tool, CoreServices Tool, or Foundation Tool for different libraries and programming languages.
Renaissance people DO exist (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday April 24 2007, @07:35PM)
There's a deeper cultural thing going on here. On this site it's not uncommon to see programming-types bash (pardon the pun) users of more graphically-oriented tools (like Flash) with incredible zeal. It's as if there's some sort of Berlin Wall between creative and techinical people, and any attempt to bridge the two is doomed to failure or must be opposed.
This is nonsense.
This seperation of arts & humanities from the sciences is a relatively recent phenomonon. It's when people work with both sides of their brains that beautiful things really start to happen. Look at Leonardo Da Vinci if you want the best example. Look at the power of tools like Flash when you get people working on it to use its more powerful features like XML parsing with ActionScript, remoting, video etc. Look at musicians who can manipulate their creations electronically. Look at the animators who produce beautiful work on the big screen like Finding Nemo, Babylon 5 etc.
A lot of creative Mac people will benefit from having a deeper understanding of the way their command-line works, and if they're approaching it from a different angle than traditional Unix fans then so what? Isn't a fresh persective a good thing? Likewise I think that a lot of Unix fans could do well to visit more art galleries and explore their creative side a bit more. It may make better programmers out of them.
For the record, I work on both sides of the fence and do an equal amount of creative and technical work.
Re:very useful (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
In the end, the terminal is just another tool on your system. Just because someone works mainly with a GUI doesn't mean that they are not able to comprehend the command-line. Yes, the first couple of times that someone uses the command-line they are going to make some dumb mistakes but if they have a decent guide then those mistakes can be kept to a minimum and have minimal negative impact.
You might as well say that it's not worth if for a person who has never programmed to learn BASIC or C. If they don't take the first steps then how do they learn in the first place? If you are going to do anything on a computer you have to start somewhere, no matter if you are used to a GUI or not.
Re:very useful (Score:5, Interesting)
> Just because someone works mainly with a GUI doesn't mean
> that they are not able to comprehend the command-line.
How true!. I've been a mac girl for 15 years or more, a choice I made from the sheer superiority of the mac gui when I started in prepress, in the 1980s. Nothing touched it then, though many other OSs have caught up and are just as usable today. It's experience that kept me employed, well paid and doing what I love. I got hold of OS X and nutted through cli stuff for a few years now, and use it sometimes and the gui sometimes. You're right, they're both tools that do a job, some can be done best in one, some best in either, and some don't matter one way or the other.
I hadn't touched a cli since DOS days, and even then I knew little more than dir, copy, cd and format. Now I co-admin my employer's non-X crippled linux servers. Most people are intelligent enough, and to me what counts more than experience is interest. I think if someone's interested enough to open terminal.app and poke around then it's just a matter of learning.
That's what brains are for, and we all have them!
Re:very useful (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.gamerspre...tasy_XII_Walkthrough)
Re:very useful (Score:4, Insightful)
That statement would ensure the death of the command line wouldn't it? I don't see many schools these days offering anything but Windows and Macs for students to learn on.
Re:very useful (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't own one because I want to join some elitist club of "creative professionals", I don't own a Mac because I think that it's somehow screwing Microsoft, I don't own a Mac because it has a candy-coated GUI, I own it because it has a solid and proven operating system derived from openstep and because it came properly set up for the hardware inside. Which for me is a prime consideration when buying a laptop.
Maybe the next laptop I buy will be x86 and Linux based again (this machine has had more than it's share of hardware failures) but OS X has always been rock solid for me, and the drivers and power management have always worked as they should, which is more than you can say for most x86 laptops even when running the OEM setup.
To me, it's just another Unix system on another flavour of hardware. Would you be telling me that I shouldn't be playing with the command line if I'd bought a SPARC laptop?
Here, for free (Score:2, Informative)
man cd
man pwd
man ls
man cp
man mv
man rm
man chmod
man more
man ps
man rm
man chmod
man more
man head
man tail
man grep
man passwd
Knock yourself out.
Re:Here, for free (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Here, for free (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is the sort of response that drives people actually looking to learn UNIX away.
I have been familiar with command line since it was typed out on paper.
However, to a newbie the manual page is no more intuitively decipherable than clicking on "Start" to shutdown is on Windows.
man pages are only of use to people who already know the command line. Others need it explained to them, and I have found it far more productive to provide them with that explanation than implying they're just too stupid to read the manual.
I see that my original post is now modded as flamebait for having this underlying point. If this one is also modded as flamebait I shall suffer that fate gladly in order to stick up for people who feel they need a good book and/or a bit hand holding to get them started and oppose the "RTFM" and "YTSTRTM" attitude.
KFG
Re:Here, for free (Score:4, Insightful)
Even Einstein and Feynman found refering to a physics textbook and taking a course or two helpful.
The context here is reading a book, not your time. You don't have to post at all, let alone take the trouble to post that you aren't going to post helpfully.
People even find books helpful in letting them know that to shutdown you have to click on the "Start" button. Or course you find help in this matter by refering to the bundled documentation, but clicking on the "Start" button.
There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.
KFG
"vi vs pico" debate... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can be more piddly than you! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.grub.net/blog/index.html | Last Journal: Wednesday June 27, @08:48AM)
I use nano, and I flame the pico users!
Pfff. Real men cat > filename and do it right the first time.
Re:I can be more piddly than you! (Score:4, Funny)
(http://synflood.at/blog/)
Re:"vi vs pico" debate... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Heh, I'm a pico user but I'm not a zealot over it. I use pico when I want to do some simple, quick editing in the command-line environment. For anything more complex I use BBEdit [barebones.com], which does pretty much everything that vi or emacs does except with a nice GUI.
But hey, use whatever works for you. Vi is certainly powerful enough. I just can't be bothered to take the time to learn all the commands, vi has a pretty high learning curve.
Re:"vi vs pico" debate... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.jenkatgames.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 07 2003, @03:00AM)
there you go
Although I use nano [nano-editor.org] now since it is available seperately from Pine and is released under the GPL.
what about Mac OS for *nix geeks? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://techfocus.net/~stanza)
I've gotten a shiny new iMac with OS X.3 on it, and I'm still learning the ropes. I'm slightly amazed at all the wierdnesses I can do with it, you can script almost anything with Applescript, and there's a million little details that do wierd shit, or behave as I'm not used to. So where is the Learning Mac OS X for the unix geek? The unix and mac world is so divided on the machine, yet works together seemlessly.
I haven't had my coffee yet, I'll ramble on about my experiences with Mac OS X elsewhere. But my question remains: what are good books/resources for the person who is already a unix geek?
Re:what about Mac OS for *nix geeks? (Score:5, Informative)
It just so happens it's available from O'Reilly as well [oreilly.com]. The Panther edition [oreilly.com] is due out in June.
why buy (Score:5, Informative)
(http://validate.sf.net/)
Re:why buy (Score:5, Informative)
Helpful for newbies, but let's face it -- those links you provided cover maybe one-half of the first chapter of O'Reilly's book.
Anybody seen a hardcore unix book for Mac admins? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Anybody seen a hardcore unix book for Mac admin (Score:5, Informative)
(http://phroggy.com/)
Apache's files are in different places on different flavors of UNIX or Linux distributions - and they're different still if the administrator compiled from source.
On Mac OS X 10.3, configuration files are in
On Slackware 8.1, configuration files are in
On RedHat 9, configuration files are in
By default on most systems, if you've compiled from source and haven't changed any paths, configuration files are in
Useful information, but to whom? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.brownsauce.org/)
I think a Unix for MacOS publication would be useful for those migrating to Apple from some (any) other platform. For casual Mac users? No way is this going to be of any use to them. If they were so inclined, they'd already have some experience on another OS by now.
Re:Useful information, but to whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience I've seen two types of large Mac user communities
(1) Mac users who want a simple OS, that is easy to use. They are not computer savvy and just want to use their machine to get the job done
(2) Unix / Mac users who hated Microsoft Windows for being neither powerful/stable nor simple/elegant to use.
Many of the people in the category (2) probably gravitated towards OSX quickly when it came out. People in category (1) waited for all their essential applications to be ported, before being forced to upgrade.
-Diganta
Re:Useful information, but to whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using Mac OS since 7, and never really used anything else (natch...I've always been in design or print production). I had to plink around in some VERY basic UNIX commands for a general computer science class in college, so I know some basic navigation and a few commands.
I have no interest in running anything but a Mac system, even just for fun, because I don't find the thought of not knowing how to do anything fun. But I'm not so stupid as to think that I can do everything I need to do in Mac OS. I've read enough tips and cool hacks and neat ways to make things work by using Terminal, that I know it would behoove me to know something beyond to basics.
If they were so inclined, they'd already have some experience on another OS by now.
So, I say BS to this. I'm inclined to learn some rudimentary stuff, but no way in hell do I care to, no imagine I could be productive in, anything else. This book sounds perfect.
Forgive Me Father, For I Am A Karma Whore... (Score:3, Informative)
(http://bitter-and-impotent-loser-counselling.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 03 2004, @08:27PM)
Okay, okay, so it's sitting there just churning the CPU. But it looks cool enough to get me chicks, so I figured you guys could use it too.
The BSD Command Line (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.gamerpride.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday June 22 2006, @10:56AM)
Essentially, anyone that uses MAC OS X (if they don't already) will see the power of BSD and UNIX and general.. and will maybe move their PCs (unless they have MAC only) from Windows to a variation of UNIX, such as BSD or Linux.
Re:The BSD Command Line (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Why would my parents, who only do application level stuff (web browsing, word processing, email, games), need to learn the "power of Unix"? They're non-technical end-users. They aren't concerned with harnessing the power of their machine, and nor should they have to be.
vice versa? (Score:3, Interesting)
A computer for the rest of us? (Score:1, Funny)
Authors read /. too (Score:5, Insightful)
Curious about other writing I've done? There's some useful free info online at 404 error page [404-error-page.com], particularly for Apache admins, and another book that slashdotters will appreciate is my Wicked Cool Shell Scripts [intuitive.com]. And, yes, Virginia, the latter includes specific scripts for Mac OS X too.
Transitioning from OS9 - XP or OSX? Easiest? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.meehawl.com/Blogfiles/ | Last Journal: Thursday December 04 2003, @06:38PM)
My question is this, given that a non-technical person's experienced with both OS9 and XP, which is easier? To transition completely to XP, or to attempt to learn the new and different OSX? I don't think she's ever willingly opened a command prompt in her life.
Re:Transitioning from OS9 - XP or OSX? Easiest? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Wednesday February 26 2003, @06:32AM)
But just in case, buy him/her a book like this for next birthday or valentine. Maybe he/her will finally like it? Just imagine this kind of foreplay: you and your SO together in bed, doing *things* on two powerbooks connected via Airport...
Fink versus Darwinports (Score:2)
(http://www.phpconsulting.com/ | Last Journal: Monday April 17 2006, @10:40AM)
UNIX filesystem (Score:2)
(http://rixstep.com/)
That's good, cos Macs run HFS+.
Re:Info on vi and pico..... (Score:2, Funny)
-1, Mac users have no sense of humor
-1, Joke at the expnense of someone other than M$ - note 1337 M155P3||1N6!
Re:Mac users from way back (Score:1)
(http://microsoft.toddverbeek.com/)
Re:Too bad (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday April 20 2004, @05:02PM)
I have 644 items in
That's why there's a user level set of folders that aren't the standar UNIX convention.
Re:Info on vi and pico..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mac users from way back (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.annmariehughes.com/)
No need for two buttons (Score:1)
Of course I personally throw away my apple mice right away and buy the logitech mouse with scroll wheel and two buttons, but it isn't really necessary.
Re:Info on vi and pico..... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Tuesday June 05, @02:55PM)
Y'know, even though that was a really lame attempt at humor, you bring up a point: why do new Macs ship with one-button mice (and mice that cost at least 3x what a usable optical would cost, at that?) Am I right in thinking that NeXT machines shipped with 3-button mice? What gives?