Defrag in OS X?

[Javintosh]

yes, hold down cmd-s during boot. the mac will go into verbose mode and boot into single user mode. you can run fsck from there.

[strobe]

Be warned that Apple's fsck isn't as good as Alsoft's Disk Warrior (in my experience)

[Javintosh]

I'd definitely second that. DiskWarrior is absolutely indispensable if you have problems. I had a problem for which fsck would not even work because the hard drive could not be mounted. Disk Warrior fixed the problem.

[hypocampers]

There's nothing really new about Apple's HFS+ apart from the fact that its rather underpowered as stated, how MacOSX handles the filesystem is just software. MAE works so its FileID is emulatable end of story, who cares how its done. Its just a sales tool to not have fsck, dump, cpio, and tar and a whole lot of other things not working, so that vendors can sell you a tool.

Apple could make Darwin work in sync with MacOS, as I said a year ago, there is no reason why except that Apple chooses not too. If they had done the proper amount of it would leave all the UNIX apps working as they should and all this conversation would not have to happen.

You can do fsck on unmounted devices, in fact UNIX would prefer it that way, single user is the next best thing.

example: fsck /dev/disk0s05

You can fsck any partition you like also.

But given Apple's lack of support for its own filesystem it won't do the job 100%, or at least I wouldn't trust it.

"dump" for the GUI bound could be renamed too "Bright Shiny New Backup Tool" and put a GUI on it for Strobe so he can hit his button, then all the GUI people would feel happy and safe, and nobody would know that it was dump all along.

9 Levels of backup, although you use Level 0 and 1 normally, level one does incerementals after you've done a level 0. Put it into a script and/or make a reference to it in cron and forget it if you like, don't even have to hit a button.

Clone-ing a disk is a piece of cake:

1. cd to target disk
2. dump 0uf - / (or device ) | restore -rf -

Bootable clones/backups are made this way, zero problem and you can do it accross networks!.

Now if MacOSX had programmed up a "dump" UNIX tool that worked, this would be a FREE and SIMPLE to use working tool. "dump" could quite happily be made aware of all of HFS+ bits and pieces (like all other vendors UNIX dump(s)) and work properly.

Whats wrong with that? Nothing!

I never said at any point that UNIX or its filesystem was the best, just that to dissmiss it as worthless garbage is intellectual nonsense.

[Javintosh]

hen people ask me what's so cool about OSX, one of the things at the top of my list is what oyu mentioned: small freeware/shareware apps that are Cocoa GUIs to UNIX applications.

It owuld be great if apple provided these, but it would be better if they appeared as very affordable shareware or freeware.

apps like Cocoa eFax, Mu Player, etc.

[hypocampers]

Agreed, there so much which is of use that could easliy be front ended.

There is a framework out there already built called "maintain1", the author gives it away. It's a great place start with project and interface builder. The author shows you how to build a GUI and interface this with UNIX apps. The application provides an already working interface to UNIX functionality.

You may know all this already.

[Javintosh]

no I didn't, then again, I could not do much about it (I do more PHP than anything else).

That's however, great to know as this type of apps are so truly handy (I should have also mentioned Cronnix which I used to grab movie info every day at 3am and write it to palm pdbs - crontab GUI)

[hypocampers]

"maintain1" can be found at www.versiontracker.com.

I have used cronninx as well, some of these tools do a better job of explaining how sme of the UNIX tools, like cron, work than the books.

I am just spending some time on PHP and Mysql, I feel useless at present, as a test case I am building a database which will manage a gymnastics competition live on the Web.

The competition is crazy in term of different age groups, apparatus and repetitions.

However I able to make up and SQl script to read in the known data, have a couple of data points to fill in later, but do the autiomatic caclulations and sorting of result online.

I have some (very long) way to go, I have a book, but I have gone past its remit on the first try. Do you know of any working demonstration projects that can be viewed and cherry picked.