Newbie question

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zberlin

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I'm a Mac user and relatively new to the Unix world. I would like the experienced users to explain the benefits of learning Unix in a Mac environment. I'm sure they're plenty. Learning Unix is by far harder than pointing and clicking on graphical O/S. Just want to see the light at the end of this tunnel Your thoughts are greatly appreciated

ZBerlin
 
Well, I learned Unix by playing around with Linux back in 1995... I found it easy to move from there to SunOS (aka Solaris), then SCO Unix, then FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and finally to Mac OS X's Darwin. Once you know Unix, its easy to apply them to another Unix-like OS.

What benefit do you get from learning Unix?? Each person is going to have a different benefit. The most immediate benefit for end users is that they are going to be able to do things to greater precision with the Terminal, than with the interface. I'm sure in time Apple will account for 90% of what you can do in the terminal - but for now you still heavily rely on it. If you have something that won't unmount properly .. you can always reboot your computer - or you can unmount it and troubleshoot it in Terminal

Learning Unix for Mac OS X will give you a better understanding of how the operating system works.

Getting into the server side of things will command that you have an understanding of the basic concepts at a minimum.

I dunno really - for me, the only reason I went to mac in the first place was because there was a Unix built into the highly usable OS .. never quantified why I was using the 'Unix' side of it in the first place - to me its an absolute :)
 
I'm in the process of learning Unix.. so when I at least reach an intermediate level I will post my thoughts. So far I've learned moving around in the bash interface and have learned to open, move, copy and delete files/apps. In a way the bash interface has replaced Quicksilver
 
I found the Mac OS X platform to be really good for learning Unix when I was doing Operating Systems 101 back in Uni. It has a lot of things that are convenient - being able to edit your assignments in Word and directly copy-paste code from the Terminal isn't possible on any other platform, for instance. In fact, from the point of view of convenience (for emailing, printing and editing scripts) it was fantastic.
 
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