UINX question

B

BBenve

Apple seeder
I. i am very new to the entire word of UNIX but i would love to appreciate the Layer Apple added to our MAC OS and use it as much as i can.
I would love to know if there is a list with all the Command to be used in the Terminal made for OSX.... i ve been around and found many command but many of them don't work... is there anything specific for X??
Thanks

Ibook Dual USB 500 MHz
384 MB ram
OSX 10.1 G40
 
OS X is a standard BSD from what I gather.
Some unix commands though have been removed for some reason. I think the best way to learn unix is to get a book. You can get prety much the basics online like learning the

ls
cd
mkdir
logout

commands but these commands take arguments, and you cant really learn em from the web. so for instance if you are in the terminal and you want to go to the "xyz" folder you cant just type "cd" and get there you have to do "cd xyz" ... there are many examples in books which are useful too :)
 
The best way to learn the power of *NIX is to read the man-files.
just type 'man appName' where appName is the name of the executable you want to learn about.

The tab-button is useful to find the right command. All executables that is in your path are reachable to the tab.
Type any letter and press tab to get a list of executables starting with that letter.
Of course you can type several letters and tab.
 
for me the man files are just confusing :p
It is like it was writen as a quick reference for people who knew unix :p
 
Originally posted by AdmiralAK
for me the man files are just confusing :p
It is like it was writen as a quick reference for people who knew unix :p
Click to expand...

man pages are reference material; they are not tutorials. You will find tutorials and papers in /usr/share/doc/papers; you might need to get access to 4.4BSD based distributions
 
man pages, I realized in a senior level college course discussing programming languages, are mritten in a syntax used to generically describe functional languagu constructs. Essentially it's an entire language of symbols denoting different functionality, necessity, quantity, and relation. It's horrible.

You need to learn an entire language abltraction concept to read man pages. Grab a book from O'Reilly, hit the tab key a lot, and find a command line hacker to bug in person.

Also, anything that's in a script run on unix is a set of commands strung together, you can learn a lot from those.
 
I must admit that I don't have OS X installed a the moment (cleaning up for 10.1) so I can't verify this, but in other unix flavours you can do 'man intro' to get a synopsis of many of the available commands.

Or, for X (BSD) specific commands check out http://www.bsd.org/unixcmds.html
 
Like everything else in unix, it's easy once you know...

yes, man intro has a nice little thingy. Too bad you can't possibly know it's there until you have had 5 years of unix experience and someone finally mentions it on a chat space. (that's my life anyway)

so, yeah, man intro works on Mac OS X
 
When you say start the Command application in OS X, what you see is what is known as the "shell" in Unix parlance.

The shell is the layer around core Unix that acts as a text-based user interface - it is how you give commands to Unix by typing at a command line. There are many shells available or Unix - each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The default shell for OS X is the C Shell. You can also use other shells like the Korn shell and BASH shell.

So, to answer your question, what you need to know is how to use the C shell. For this, I would strongly recomend you read a good introductory book to Unix and the C Shell

And by the way, the comment by 'offets' probably confused the hell out of you ... the term 'X' in Unix-speak usually refers to X-Windows - the standard graphical interface on top of most Unix systems. In OS X, there is no standard support for X-Windows - Apple have developed their own graphical interface called Aqua. However, the open-source Xfree86 has been modified to run on OS X (or rather, Darwin - the core Unix layer of OS X)
 
My advice to learning unix is to go get a unix in a nutshell or a book like that :) Two years ago thats how I learned it :)


Admiral
 
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