OK, here is a small "how to" for knowing how to do a few basic things in UNIX (specifically the terminal in OS X).
Now when you open you your terminal you probably see something like:
Welcome to Darwin!
[hostname:~] your_username%
--> for the purposes of this HOW to we will use this:
Welcome to Darwin!
[admiralty:~] admiral%
<--
Now you might wonder how to so stuff in the terminal.
This is where the HOW-TO comes in handy.
(NOTE: I will do one command per post )
Lets start off with a command that lets you see what exaclty you have in teh directory you are in!
This command is the
ls command.
The ls command could be thought of as "list" (list what's here). Doing the ls gives you something like this:
Code:
[admiralty:~] admiral% ls
Desktop Library Music Public admiralty
Documents Movies Pictures Sites
[admiralty:~] admiral%
What is in sylver color are the contents of where I am now (which happens to be my home directory).
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There are special "flags" that go along with the LS command which "format" the output. Three useful ones are the following:
Code:
[admiralty:~] admiral% ls -a
. .FBCIndex Documents Pictures
.. .FBCLockFolder Library Public
.CFUserTextEncoding .Trash Movies Sites
.DS_Store Desktop Music admiralty
[admiralty:~] admiral%
the -a flag tells the ls command to show you EVERYTHING, yes!, even the invisible files (that start with a period (.) )
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There also exists the -l command which "lists" everything in a row. Lets examine it:
Code:
[admiralty:~] admiral% ls -l
total 0
drwx------ 4 admiral staff 264 Oct 4 19:29 Desktop
drwx------ 5 admiral staff 264 Oct 4 19:29 Documents
drwx------ 22 admiral staff 704 Oct 7 15:10 Library
drwx------ 2 admiral staff 264 Oct 4 19:30 Movies
drwx------ 2 admiral staff 264 Oct 4 19:30 Music
drwx------ 2 admiral staff 264 Oct 4 19:30 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 3 admiral staff 264 Aug 21 13:34 Public
drwxr-xr-x 4 admiral staff 264 Aug 21 13:34 Sites
drwxr-xr-x 9 admiral staff 264 Oct 4 19:47 admiralty
[admiralty:~] admiral%
Now you might be wondering what drwxrwxrwx is and all that stuff that is above.
--> continues bellow