Mac OS X Tiger/A Quick Look Under the Hood
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[edit] Introduction
Underneath the pretty desktop background, candy-like graphics, and slick effects on the surface of Mac OS X is a UNIX foundation. UNIX handles all of the under-the-hood tasks of managing accounts, files, networking, performance, etc. While Apple's interface is very pretty and easy-to-learn, power users may wish to try out interacting with their Mac through UNIX's more traditional interface: the command line.
Please note that this chapter covers only the very basics of using the command line, and assumes you have no experience with command lines, programming, etc. If you want a more advanced look at UNIX, please use the Advanced Mac OS X Tiger Wikibook.
As with all versions of Unix, OSX consists of a kernel (as described in history) and some core utils that are available through bash. The kernel and the core utils are open-source. The UNIX theory consists in providing only basic functionalities (for example, the cp program can only copy one file from a location to another) and so this model is fast, bug free, and secure because it's easily maintainable (taken from a Linux kernel programing book); everything is split into small parts for this reason.
[edit] Getting to the Command Line
To access the command line, you'll use the Terminal Utility. It's in the Applications > Utilities folder.
[edit] bash: The UNIX Finder
- ls
- cp
- rm
- rmdir
- tar
- less
- more
- ps
- ssh
- scp
- man
[edit] compiler version
http://www.voxgratia.org/docs/compilers.html
[edit] Unix environment and programs
As in all Unix systems, you can install and run UNIX software (for example X11, .KDe, etc.) on Mac OS X. There is even the Gentoo (Linux distribution) package system that runs under OSX (portage)
The Fink project ( http://fink.sourceforge.net ) maintains a collection of packages that have been ported to OSX and makes them available for download as a coherent distribution. Fink uses Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get to provide powerful binary package management. You can choose whether you want to download precompiled binary packages or build everything from source.
[edit] Limitations
the file-system is not case sensitive
