Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther 337
| Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther | |
| author | Dave Taylor and Brian Jepson |
| pages | 168 |
| publisher | O'Reilly |
| rating | 8/10 |
| reviewer | Matthew Leingang |
| ISBN | 0596006179 |
| summary | Nice and Easy |
You can do a tremendous amount of stuff in Mac OS X Panther without ever touching the command line. This includes editing files, transferring them to remote locations, running a web server, and writing programs. Legend has it that some Apple developers wanted to ship OS X without a command-line application because it's anathema to the Mac "experience." But as Unix geeks will tell you, there are tasks which are much better suited to the command line. Routine, repeated, and automated tasks are some, as well as quick-and-easy access to files and directories.
This book is for the skilled Mac user who would like to know a little more about the operating system behind the scenes. There's also information about the Mac's brand of Unix, so someone familiar with Unix but new to the Mac will also find stuff to learn. For those confident in their Mac and Unix skills, however, there's not much new in the book's 168 pages. That's not to say it's a bad book; I found it quite enjoyable to read, and it's a good title to keep in mind to recommend to a Unix novice.
The book begins with an introduction to Terminal.app, the Mac's Unix terminal program. From the very basic (how to find with the Finder) to the fun (how to change the text and background colors) to the useful (how to save terminal sessions into double-clickable .term files), there's much that Terminal has to offer. There's even the cryptic echo '^[]2;My-Window-Title^G' command to change the title of Terminal's window.
The authors then introduce a few simple commands like date and who, and show how to manipulate the terminal's prompt. There's also alias which creates command shortcuts. For instance, if you always run ls with the -F flag, a command alias ls "ls -F" will save you some typing.
Each chapter has two sections which stand out. The "Practice" section gives a list of exercises to try, and the "Problem Checklist" is there to diagnose and fix unexpected behavior.
It's important (especially for those used to other OSes) to understand that in Unix, everything is a file, and all files are organized in the filesystem. This includes plain files, which might be Word documents or system logs; directories, which break up the filesystem into a tree; links, which allow file reuse with different names; devices, drives, etc. All these building blocks of the operating system are discussed. There are also a few pages on vi (which I found quite useful as my vi knowledge up to that point consisted of :q!.) and pico.
Printing on Mac OS X is much like printing on any Unix operating system; you can use pr to format text for line printing, enscript to format for PostScript printing, and lpr to actually queue a printer job. The addition that the Mac provides is a CLI to AppleTalk printers. You can use at_cho_prn to choose an AppleTalk printer and atprint to print to one.
One of Unix's biggest features is its ability to put together small programs to do many different tasks. To count how many files under your home directory are named foo, you can do find ~ -type f -name "foo" | wc -l. By breaking down a problem into components, you only need one-counting program, one file-finding program, etc. The book has a good chapter on this input/output redirection, and how to use those magic top-row characters |, >, >>, and <. Grep (and some light regular expressions) and sort are mentioned as tools for examining text. I thought sed would make a nice addition to this chapter, but perhaps it would lengthen the book too much.
Another advantage of Unix is its true multitasking. What may surprise newcomers to the command-line is that it is possible to run many jobs at once with a single interface. By running commands in the background, one can start large jobs and do other tasks while waiting. In the chapter on multitasking, the & modifier is covered, along with fg, bg, and kill to manipulate processes, and ps and top to report on them.
The command-line interface is lightweight enough that it can easily be extended by a network. This means it's easy (in fact, commonplace) to control a computer different from the one in front of which you're sitting. The authors cover the remote-shell commands ssh and its non-secure cousins, as well as other tools for accessing the internet such as ftp and curl.
The book closes with an introduction to the wealth of open-source software available for Macintosh, now that Macs run a functional Unix. The graphical Unix applications require an X server, which is easy to download and install. The authors show how to install Fink, the Macintosh open-source package manager, and a few big applications like OpenOffice.org and The Gimp.
The last chapter is both a resource list and suggestions for further directions. Those who learn a lot from this book may be interested in picking up shell programming or a scripting language such as Perl.
As I said at the beginning, the book is basic and well-written. Even if you feel it's beneath you, keep the title in mind when a newbie asks what the command-line is all about.
Matthew Leingang is a Preceptor in Mathematics at Harvard University. A funny sentence in the third person escapes him at the moment. 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.
Word Count in Word (Score:5, Insightful)
Tools -> Word Count
Why is that so hard? It's File -> Properties -> Statistics in OpenOffice.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
To count how many files under your home directory are named foo, you can do find ~ -type f -name "foo" | wc -l
which is obviously a lot more intuitive than opening up File Explorer and sorting by file name... isn't it
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but to call them you'd have to find the phone and plug it in, and then wait for the dial tone to init.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. I think you'd make a great benchmark designer. Pick an obscure task that almost nobody needs done, stack the "other" side with an unusual configuration for modern computers and use it as a case in declare that "your" way is a lot better in general.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense! A GUI is a *great* way to organize a few dozen xterms.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:3, Funny)
Speed of command lin (Score:3, Insightful)
There are definitely speed advantages to command lines.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:5, Informative)
Easy peasy.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:4, Interesting)
I really wish Apple would bring this back... just because it is so damn cool an idea.
This [applefritter.com] page has more information, halfway down.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
Yikes. That's a little harder:
Or something like that.
At this point, I think the solution is to not use Word nor Excel files.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:3, Informative)
It's been described as "like grep if it was bitten by a radioactive spider". In a nutshell it allows you do define sliding windows and search for phrases inside those windows.
It's way cool.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2, Interesting)
I like to view it like this:
With a command line, you speak directly to the program, if you know the language to use.
A GUI is going through an intermediary translator who organizes words by categories you don't recognize, obfuscating an already complicated task by playing hide-and-go-seek with nested menus.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:5, Funny)
If you hook wires up to all the pins on your processor and move them really quickly between connections for the voltages corresponding to 0 and 1, you speak directly to the machine, if you know the language to use. And have really fast hands.
A command line translates your typing into a language your computer can understand.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to modify that to say "The command line is an obfuscation and a hinderence to people who only know what they want to do and not how to do it."
The command line is extremly powerful. The GUI has it's place though. If you put someone in front of a command line with no insturction, they will have trouble getting around. There are 100+ keys on a keyboard as opposed to 2(3) buttons on a mouse. If you do enought clicking on any desktop environment, you can figure out how to get at least somthing done.
A GUI can be superior to a command prompt in some situations as well. Say you want to move 15 dissimilarly named files in one directory to another. In a GUI, you open up two "explorer" windows, use your mouse to select exactly which files you want and drag them to the other window. With a CLI, you have to type the 15 distinct file names as well as the destination folder. You could end up with the final command being 3-4 lines long and are more likely to make errors.
A GUI can make things easy that are tedious in a CLI. A CLI can make things easy that are tedious in a GUI.
Thankfully you don't have to choose one or the other. There's no reason to.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
To be precise, part of GUI design is to be a virtual keyboard extension. All those buttons you see in toolbars are very much like if you had that button on your keyboard. (Some specialized forms of equipment, especially medical, do have such buttons.) The GUI just saves you from buying a new keyboard for every program you want to run.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
I don't think any GUI designers are really using "keyboard replacement" as a paradigm for their design. 30 years ago you'd probably have argued that the goal of a keyboard was to mimic what you can do with a stack of punch cards.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
Funny. I think that about many GUI apps.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:3, Insightful)
But what if you don't know the language to use? That's the main advantage of a GUI over a CLI. If you don't know how to do a word count in a command line environment then you must resort to looking it up in help. If you don't know how to do a word count in a GUI then all you have to do is explore the menus to find the command. Every command is already there right in front of you.
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2, Informative)
Ohh! The agony!
Google: word count unix: First return:
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
Word: wc with too many "features" (Score:5, Funny)
There's no GUI analogue, perhaps because anybody tempted to make one would add too many "features" that cluttered its ease of use. Think: do you know how to count the words in a Word file?
Tools -> Word Count
Yes, Word could be considered to be wc with too many other "features"!
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
Re:Word Count in Word (Score:2)
I call shenanigans! (Score:3, Informative)
This is embarrassing.
Linguistic origins (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Linguistic origins (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linguistic origins (Score:2)
Re:Linguistic origins (Score:2)
2. Have a link? Here's mine: http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/usail/concepts/unixhx.html [iu.edu]
Re:Linguistic origins (Score:2)
Re:Linguistic origins (Score:2)
Re:*looks surprised" (Score:2)
Command line in OSX (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Command line in OSX (Score:2)
Cygwin is Unix tools for windows.
Re:Command line in OSX (Score:2)
It 'works' for the most part. I get issues with 'X' and things like WebSphere installers and Admin GUI clients.
But for straight command line that is pretty seemless with Windows, I agree, it works very well.
MS's SFU is a hunk of junk by comparison.
Re:Command line in OSX (Score:4, Interesting)
I manage a dorm network with 44 computers, mine is the only one with cygwin installed, I guarantee it. So it's nice to go up to a Mac, open a terminal, and have it be useful.
Re:Command line in OSX (Score:3)
I can also administer it remotely. Handy for when my wife has some sort of problem with something, or when I have a spare minute and want to do something on my home computer.
Re:Command line in OSX (Score:2)
For starters, try Cygwin [cygwin.com]. I keep this on my work Windows boxes. It's a lot to install though, so I don't recommend carrying it around on CD to put on other peoples' PCs.
When working on other peoples' PCs, consider carrying the -tiny branch of UnitKit for Windows [twu.net] around on a USB flash drive.
Re:Command line in OSX (Score:2)
Wow.
Count words in BBEdit (Score:3, Informative)
Yea, the big freaking button with "i" in a circle right in the middle of toobar. It will tell you characters, words, lines and pages. Even easier and faster to use than wc.
Or, you can set a menu key (Score:2)
Do you know how to count words at all? (Score:5, Informative)
And, of course, if you're writing in Japanese, wc counts your entire document as being one word long.
What does this have to do with Unix? It's a classic example of Einstein's dictum that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. The Unix command wc is a classic exmple.
Re:Do you know how to count words at all? (Score:2)
Re:Do you know how to count words at all? (Score:2)
catdoc filename.doc | wc -l
(or lynx -dump filename.html | wc -l)
Of course you knew that. It _is_ a stupid example. Both examples here demonstrate part of the point: the strength of the command line isn't in wc, it's in being able to chain together simple commands easily to accomplish complex tasks.
And the strength of the GUI is in making the simple tasks trivial.
(catdoc is at http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/ice/catdoc/ ; I used to use it successfully to read Word documents I got as attachments from people, but I haven't gotten one in years).
Re:Do you know how to count words at all? (Score:2)
Re:Do you know how to count words at all? (Score:2)
alias texwc='dvi2tty report.dvi | sed "s/\. \.//g" | sed "s/ \.
Pretty nasty! The seds remove the junk that artificially inflates the word count the most, like page numbers, page headers and the table of contents. What I really need is something like:
dvi2tty --for-screen report.dvi | wc
where --for-screen makes dvi2tty format the output for a screen rather than for printing to a line printer. Ironically this would make it perform the function that its name matches!
Re:Do you know how to count words at all? (Score:2)
Paradoxically, word counting is a particularly hard problem from dvi, precisely because it's a display-oriented format, not a content-oriented format.
Re:Do you know how to count words at all? (Score:2)
Re:Do you know how to count words at all? (Score:2)
Ouch, I hadn't considered how complex it would be to program such a simple thing.
Mac vs Unix (Score:4, Interesting)
I find it uncomfortable for obvious reasons (new way of doing things). Yet, while I only do file movement, touches, etc via the command line in unix/linux, and I only do GUI file touches, movement, etc on Windows, I find myself using an unwieldy GUI (Finder) to do the same thing on Mac. I can fire up an xterm and do it that way, but I don't 'want' to.
That is odd for me. Can't quite explain it. Mac is (even as a unix variant) its own creature. It leaves me feeling like I have the power of the universe in a little pretty living space.
Maybe cause I am new to it still.
Re:Mac vs Unix (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Mac vs Unix (Score:2)
There are finder replacements out there. There was one shareware application (I can't remember the name) that had a very similar look to finder but added features. It came highly recommended but I had to turn it away. The problem was that it added too many features and I didn't see it as worth my time to learn.
Good points (Score:4, Interesting)
What I especially like about their use of the Terminal is pretty much anything that can be done in the OS, can be done on the command line. Example: changing a computer's name. Think fast: how does one do this in Windows? If you started saying "command line, net with options..." you know more than most. Windows coerces you to use the GUI. Mac encourages it, but doesn't force it (at least, since they got rid of OS 9).
Not to mention the Fink project, which adds tons of great apps to the command line. Again, I'm no Apple zealot, but their decision to have a robust command line in OS X was a great one.
Re:Good points (Score:5, Informative)
Fink is nice, but it tends to make something of a mess. Even worse, that mess is mixed in with your current files, making it difficult to clean up later. I've found that http://packages.opendarwin.org [opendarwin.org] works better. Don't access it through your web browser. just select finder, then click on the "Go" menu, then "Connect to Server...". Place that URL in the textfield and click "OK". You should now have a WebDAV archive of opensource binaries mounted on your desktop.
Have fun!
Re:Good points (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. Everything Fink installs is found under
Re:Good points (Score:2)
Re:Good points (Score:2)
Re:Good points (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait a minute: first, Fink doesn't have replacement packages for cp, rm , ls, nor df. None of them get replaced even "effectively".
Now, suppose that they post an improved version of, say, ls. If you choose to install their version, then of course you want it to "effectively" replace the system's version. I mean, you should know what you are installing and why (unless you are rather clueless, in which case you probably don't want to mess with Fink/OpenDarwin/etc).
Allegedly, it would be better if they appended
Re:Good points (Score:3, Informative)
1) Launch Terminal.app
2) sudo rm -rf
3) Fink is nothing but a memory
Re:Good points (Score:2)
if you want to know what the name is set to currently then just hostname with no parameters.
If you are running OSX server then you use the
serversetup --setCOmputerName computername
Don't ever muck with the files directly unless you know what you are doing. If you mess with the
In the Mac there is a command line for everything. Just download the PDF and search it.
Umm, yeah (Score:2)
Leingang doesn't?
I mean I'm all for MacOSX and I often use the command line, but I also think clicking "Tools" and selecting "Word Count" from the drop down is more fun than typing a string of commands into a CLI.
Re:Umm, yeah (Score:2)
You're being disingenuous (Score:5, Insightful)
For my current document, it reads:
Statistics:
Pages 23
Words 10,234
Characters (no spaces) 52,996
Characters (with spaces) 63,140
Paragraphs 107
Lines 660
One of the really nice things about GUI's is that they make rarely used commands (like word count) really easy to discover. You just look in the menu, and there it is. Compare that to a UNIX command prompt, where if you don't know how to write scripts and you don't know that the "wc" command is for word counts, you are lost.
adding to my previous response (Score:3, Insightful)
Having one large, all-purpose tool is better because instead of having to learn many simple tools with different syntax and stringing them all together in a massive chain of fork()'s and file handles, we can use a single tool that is more sophisticated, more consistent, and more resource efficient for big tasks. As Rob Pike said in his interview here [slashdot.org] so recently, the days of one tool doing one job well "are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."
Hear Hear (Score:2)
id mod you up if I could.
people are quick to laud the CLI and bash the GUI but there are advatages to both... and the discussion is not complete without looking at all of this. I have used the command line plenty, in both Mac OS X and in other flavors of UNIX. I have never used "wc" and wouldnt have even thought to type "wc" to get a word count on a document. Word count isnt something that I have had the need for, but if I did, it would be a lot easier to discover how to do it in word (or BBEdit, which is really easy) that to try and guess what command would do it from the CLI.
Command lines. (Score:2)
It's stuff like this that newbies haven't a clue about, intermediates hunger for, and perhaps even a few experts don't even know. This is exactly why some people find the command line cryptic and clumsy.
the hard way (Score:5, Funny)
Get Mod 0 for MS Answer - Higher if OO or Combo (Score:2, Interesting)
Related titles (Score:3, Interesting)
As I am considering the advanced Unix users that browse this forum, I'd suggest having a look at that book too/instead.
Typical OS bigotry (Score:2, Insightful)
But that's not really the point. Knowing how to do something in one OS does not make the one you are ignorant about an inferior OS. If you truly do know both OSes, then I'll listen to your opinions. Until then, I'd stay away from making comparisons.
It is the height of arrogance to assume that if you don't know something that it must not exist.
More retarded assery from the zealot front (Score:4, Interesting)
It's powerful because you can create intelligent scripts to automate tasks. Then you launch those scripts by clicking them.
You aren't going to win anyone over by typing in some esoteric "find ~ blah | fart pipe * & (! exemo!'" command, when you could have just opened the search box and typed "foo". You're just going to look like an elitest dick.
Once upon a time, I knew all those stupid commands and switches and would pipe output through 98 different little apps to find something out.
Now I'm happy as a clam to spend my time and energy doing other things with my computer.
This summary, at least, is all about "using a command line to make simple tasks harder so that you can feel like a real 1337 h4z0r everytime you do something so mundane as count the words in a file"
wc: (Score:2)
I still contend that Textpad is the best text editor that I've ever seen.
Let the GUI v CLI battle commence (Score:2)
I've been looking for a simple X application that was a pipe interrupter, sort of a GUI 'cat', call it 'xcat'. The idea is to type a command like:
xcat foo.c | wc -l
and xcat would fill its buffer with foo.c, pop up to let you modify the buffer, and send the results to 'wc -l'.
There are a lot of times when I want to gather text from a variety of places (including GUI places) and run it through a command line filter. An 'xcat' would help unify my world a bit.
I end up typing (to continue the example)
vi foo.c
(inside vi:)
!Gwc -l
to pipe the contents of vi's buffer through 'wc -l'. It's not optimal.
Looking for 'xcat' made me feel guilty for not knowing how to program for X Windows. Researching how to program for X Windows made me like the command line! There doesn't seem to be a simple, cross-platform, it'll work everywhere, X toolkit.
Now I just hate the world, and will retreat into my own bitterness.
Re:Let the GUI v CLI battle commence (Score:2)
Re:Let the GUI v CLI battle commence (Score:2)
I know sed, or at least I think I do. It's the kind of filter I use a lot. Is there some feature or implementation of sed that lets you cut and paste from a GUI context?
I am wiser now. (Score:3, Informative)
But the fact that so many slashdotters stepped up already and cared enough about nitpicking the record straight that they have posted the path to the word count tool in Word at least half a dozen times already, fills me with hope!
I feel as if I have gained wisdom from this simultaneous despair and revival. The feeling is probably false, though.
Incidentally, the finest and most satisfying way to count words (if wc's answer is good enough) is to use wc... from vim.
Re:I am wiser now. (Score:2)
Can you use them to count the words added to a file every five minutes, to count the words ONLY on the lines beginning with "IMPORTANT", to count the number of words past the 40th character on long lines, to count the number of words in the ID3 titles in your iTunes Music folder,
the finest and most satisfying way to count words (if wc's answer is good enough) is to use wc... from vim.
Heretic. Luckily the nvi from Jaguar runs on Panther.
how many ways to do wc in a gui (word) (Score:5, Insightful)
Already I'm seeing in the posts exactly what and why CLI users throw up their hands trying to deal with GUI.... and "wc" is a pretty good example. When the OP asked Think: do you know how to count the words in a Word file?, I knew without even reading on in the posts I was going to encounter (and, I did):
For those who didn't bother to sign up for the clue, the question was mostly rhetorical, and was an example of the diff between CLI and GUI. I know my immediate response wasn't, "I know EXACTLY how to do that in word," but rather, "Hmmmmm, I know I've solved that and found that "option" SOMEWHERE in word before, but I don't remember exactly where..."
OTOH, were you to ask CLI users the same question.... they would all know exactly how to use wc, and interestingly enough, had you asked the same question to the CLI users over the past fifteen years you would have gotten the same answers. So, in addition to a simple answer, CLI is a consistent one.
P.S.And don't even get me started about the menus with chevrons! Assuming for the sake of argument we are talking about the current version of WORD, have YOU ever tried to walk someone through this kind of stuff over the phone? With MS' genius implementation of self-modifying menus, you could "claim" something is in a menu when trying to help someone when in fact because of their use menus, their menu is completely different from yours.
Re:how many ways to do wc in a gui (word) (Score:3, Informative)
Without knowing where it was beforehand it took me about 5 seconds to find the following:
Right click on any Toolbar, Customize, Options, and check "Always show full menus."
Re:how many ways to do wc in a gui (word) (Score:2)
Yes, you found it.... I've found it, many times! But why would we even have to go through this hoop in the first place? The crowning achievements I'm seeing in posters is, "I found it!", which misses the point. In WORD, and most other MS products, learning how, when, where, and why typically isn't sufficient to "know" the interface -- they're always changing it -- and we're always having to re-learn it. I can do that, I can deal with it, but why should I have to?
Learn it once, that should be all you have to know.
And, again to my point about the chevron menus -- it wasn't that the problem is/was insoluble, just that it even exists in the first place. Plus, it really does become a pain trying to help people, especially over the phone.
Re:how many ways to do wc in a gui (word) (Score:3, Interesting)
The unspoken prime directive of interface design is No Moving Targets. It makes the UI harder to learn, slower to use and more frustrating. This implementation of menus does a grave disservice to novice suers (sorry, too many SCO articles). The best way to learn what a program does is to explore the menus. Making that an unecessarily time consuming and frustrating task discourages novices from learning [1]. People learn an interface both visually and kinetically. Kinesthetic memory plays a big role in how we learn software [2], moving targets retards this process. And by making everyone's menus different you create a support nightmare.
The main role of a menu is to group common functions spatially without taking up much of the screen (this is one reason why Apple has stuck with a single menu bar for 20 years). The introduction of hierarchical menus was a controversial move in interface design, since it hid some of the commands. The Views menu in a word processor is a good example. They're a necessary evil since menus can't be too long either. But when Windows hides the rarely used functions they remove those functions from the user's ken altogether, defeating the purpose of menus.
The rarely used fucntions can be the most important. Adding an extra click to get at the more powerful functions hinders the intermediate users. There is always the option to customize the menus or keyboard shortcuts, but requiring the suer to do that to easily perform any but the most basic functions is a sign of poor design.
Their concept was probably a Marketing idea: make the menus learn how the user works and adapt themselves accordingly. It looks great on a presentation but you wouldn't want to use it.
[1] Yes, you can point to this and say that Windows causes stupid users.
[2] cf. both Tognazzini and Nielsen
Re:how many ways to do wc in a gui (word) (Score:2)
OTOH, the CLI answer *could* just as easily be anything, and it can be pretty hard to find if you don't know. I could make an wordcount tool be called "wrdcnt" or "wordcount". Given only the executable name 'wc', I have to go reading through manuals to find out what '/s' might do, if anything. So, it's fast as long as you're operating on a system that uses all the same commands, and you're using commands/switches you're familiar with.
Compare that with using a GUI, and I might say, I don't remember exactly where 'word count' is, but quickly scrolling through the menus will find it in any decent word processor. Usually, if there are any options to be found, it'll be apparent-- I won't need to RTFM.
P.S.And don't even get me started about the menus with chevrons!
You're absolutely right about the stupidity of self-modifying menus. A power user will know how to modify the menus himself, and self-modifying menus placed in front of a newbie will only serve toward confusion. However, let's not confuse a criticism of Microsoft's implimentation of their GUI with a criticism of GUIs themselves.
I think the simple truth is, there are some activities that can be accomplished quicker and more easily on a GUI, and some tasks that are quicker and more easily accomplished with a CLI. If you have both (which, I can't think of an actively developed OS that can't), then you get to pick and choose which works for you for each task, so why complain?
Word 2004 ALWAYS shows word count (Score:4, Informative)
The default install of Word 2004 for Mac always shows the word count, in the lower right hand corner. It shows it as XXX/YYY, where XXX is how many words are before the cursor, and YYY is for the entire document.
As a professional writer, I can't imagine what wc would offer me that would be better than that! I often work on very specific total word targets for articles, so I can track if I'm under or (much more likely) over, and tweak accordingly.
Personally, I haven't been able to use Word on Windows since they started putting the icons in the wrong place in the menus. The PowerBook 17" is the ideal writing machine today, in my opinion.
Rant time (Score:5, Insightful)
Word: I don't know how to word count. I can either trawl the menus (Hmm, "Tools" looks possible- gee, option 4 is Word Count- maybe that works) or click Help and type word count and get the #1 option: How to count words. Farking trivial for poo-flinging chimp, perhaps less so for a typical user but having worked help desk, I've never gotten a call about this. I get a nice list of pages, words, characters, paragraphs, etc.
Unix. Well, gurus know wc. If not, how do I find out about it? Perhaps I actually know the "man -k" command. Let's try "man -k word count"- hmm, ~8 pages scroll by. I'm a really smart unix user: "man -k word count |more". Let's look at the entries
#1- BN_add_word (3ssl) - arithmetic functions on BIGNUMS with integers. Hmm- fuck no. (Omitting much BN badness)
#8- EVP_BytesToKey (3ssl) - password based encryption routine. What the hell? I just want to count words, damnit.
4 screens later, I actually find wc- maybe that will work.
"wc myfile.txt". (And it had better be ASCII text- don't try feeding wc a file in Japanese. Or an HTML file for that matter: Word correctly counts the actual text without the tags, wc won't) "1624 2282 53168 myfile.txt" Ok, which number do I care about? "man wc" Hmm- probably the second. But hey- it's scriptable. That means it's better, right?
Witness the amazing power of the command line: I can dick around for five minutes trying to figure out what command to use and end up with one vastly inferior for almost all tasks compared to the GUI version.
I love command lines, I really do. (I have to- I admin a couple of Unix boxes) But people vastly underestimate how powerful GUI tools have gotten and how long it takes to learn the arcane syntax of a typical Unix shell.
Ignorance of the competition doesn't help (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of the early 90's, this reminds me of a conversation I had on a TeX mailing list around 1994. I was thrilled with the idea behind TeX and struggling with the implementation. In the course of getting some answers about the surprisingly difficult process of setting up columns of varying widths, I overheard a conversation in which some TeX zealot was meandering on about all the things Word couldn't do. The problem was that all of the things he was talking about were things Word could do. He simply never got familiar enough with the application to actually use it well.
Word has its problems, it is true. It has a number of bugs that may or may not be a problem, depending on which features you use. Recent versions have become lumbering resource hogs without adding much new functionality. It lacks some expert layout features that would enable it to fully close the gap with real document layout software, though it's good enough 90% of the time. It's owned by Microsoft. It is, however, probably the most comprehensive and full-featured word processor out there. OpenOffice.org is getting very close, owing more to stagnant development at Microsoft than anything else, and may overtake it soon. I've started using it for complex documents and, most of the time, I don't miss Word.
You see the reverse with GIMP advocates. The claim that GIMP is as good as Photoshop can only be made by people who don't know Photoshop very well and whose graphic output is mostly limited to web pages. GIMP isn't even close to Photoshop, and as opposed to the situation with Word and Microsoft, Adobe lavishes so much developer resources on Photoshop that the gap is actually growing.
To return to the original topic, yes, wc is a handy utility. But it is really much more useful for data manipulation by programmers and other IT professionals than for anything else. And if you want to enlighten people about the virtues of commandline tools -- and they are indeed legion -- it helps if you don't immediately discredit yourself by discussing applications that you understand only very superficially.
Unix? (Score:2)
Furthermore, iirc, OSX is still not technically capable of holding the "UNIX" badge from The Open Group.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate.
Now, as far as having some tcsh commandline skills on OSX, that would surely be useful for some every-day puttering around on the desktop.
But most anyone I know (primarily solaris, Linux, Freebsd and Obsd guys) who ran out and bought a powerbook or such for OSX either now dual boot or have wiped OSX completely for *BSD or *nuxPPC.
A failing on their part, maybe?
wc counts words??? (Score:4, Insightful)
What I'm saying is, people who complain about the "how many ways do you know to count words?" example are missing the forest for the trees. 'wc' is one of countless small UNIX utilities that I sting together in new combinations ever every day. I don't write books or magazines, so I *never* care how long my files are in that sense. But seeing how many lines in a log file contain a certain string is useful every day.
Besides, "In the Beginning..." was written back in 1998 or 1999.
Beyond WC: The coolest things about unix in OS X is the interaction with the GUI. I can type "scp " and then drag a file from the desktop into the Terminal window and then finish with the destination server and path. I can be anywhere in the filesystem and say "open
funny they should mention find... (Score:4, Insightful)
find . -type f | xargs foo
to
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 foo
For a good laugh, try explaining why that is necessary to a Unix newbie!
he just tricked you stupid bastards (Score:3, Funny)
[it's a joke son, move along]
Re:Mac and the command line (Score:2)
An emacs fan would never even consider typing "vi" on the command line.
Re:Mac and the command line (Score:2)
I can just see some poor user in a beginning lisp programming course stuck in a editor he doesn't know how to quit. Or start typing text into.
Re:Mac and the command line (Score:2)
Re:wc gui analog (Score:3, Interesting)
To get things started, I whipped one up with 15 lines of applescript. For those too lazy to open up AppleScript Editor I posted a 'compiled' version. [beastiebox.com]
Just add extract and toss on your desktop or in your dock: drop files on to see the wc magic. Source code follows:I know you were half-joking, but when it's so easy, why not?Re:Useful, acutally. (Score:2)
Re:OSX (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking all that into account, I'm not sure what your point is. Maybe you were just trolling, but someone must not have thought so, since you were modded insightful.