Using UNIX on Your MacBook

Pick up a copy of the great book of lore entitled UNIX For Dummies, 5th Edition, written by John R. Levine and Margaret Levine Young (Wiley). Go where no trackpad has gone before The … Chapter 1: Using UNIX on Your MacBook In This Chapter Why use UNIX? Doing things with the keyboard Introducing UNIX commands Creating text files Exploring deep inside Mac OS X A s I mention in the first chapter of the Book II, UNIX lurks deep beneath the shiny Aqua exterior of Mac OS X. UNIX is a tried-and-true operating system that’ …

Why Use the Keyboard? Automate to elevate If all these benefits are beginning to excite you, hold on to your socks! Not only can you perform complex commands with the command line, you can go even one step further: automation. If you find yourself using the same set of commands more than once, you’re a likely candidate for using automation to save time. Instead of typing the list of commands each time, you can save them to a text file and execute the entire file with only one command. Now that’s power, right up there with the dynamic duo of AppleScript and Automator! Of course, you probably don’t like doing housekeeping tasks while you’re busy on other things, so schedule that list of commands to run in the middle of the night while you’re fast asleep. UNIX lets you do that, too, using the launchd command. Note that automation of UNIX commands is totally separate from automation of Mac OS X applications with AppleScript and Automator, which I cover in Book IX, Chapter 2. Remote control “So, Mark, the command line is the cat’s meow for efficiently accessing and working with files on my MacBook, and I can use it to automate many operations. Anything else?” I’m glad you asked! By using the command line, you can also send commands to another computer anywhere in the world (as long as you know the right login and password). After you log into another computer, you can use the same commands for the remote computer. UNIX was created with multiple users in mind. Because computers used to be expensive (and honking huge machines to boot), UNIX was designed so that multiple users could remotely use the same machine simultaneously. In fact, if Mac OS X is your first encounter with UNIX, you might be surprised to know that many UNIX beginners of the past weren’t even in the same room, building, state, or even country as the computer that they were using. Not only can you work with a computer that’s in a different physical location, but it’s also very fast to do so. Instead of the bandwidth hog that is the Internet, the command line is lean and mean. This permits you to use a remote computer nearly as fast as if it were sitting on the desk in front of you. (This is a great advantage for road warriors who need to tweak a Web or an e-mail server from a continent away.)…