Hi Josh, Dave, Karen, Scott, and Others,
If you want a good place to start learning about using the terminal
and types of commands that you might issue from Terminal, I'd
recommend "Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal" by Joe
Kissell:
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/command-line
The Take Control series are very well written, and some of the books,
like this one, contain material that I've never found presented in
quite the same way (or sometimes, at all) anywhere else. They're
available as downloadable PDF files that you can easily read in
Preview, and any information presented in figures is well described in
the text. Any minor version updates are available as free downloadable
updates, and if there's a major version update you'll probably be
offered a discount for the update. List prices are typically either
$10 or $15. They also now supply free ePub versions for reading on
the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, and all their books are DRM-free. This
book is a good introduction to the Mac's flavor of unix, basic
concepts behind commands, the shell, and syntax, what sort of things
the bash shell will let you do, as well as the instances in which you
might want to use the terminal.
Scott's already found out about perl, python, zsh, and figured out
that gcc is not in the default setup (but is it's available in the
developer's toolkit, either from your startup disk or from the web).
There's a Bookshare volume, "Mac OS X for Unix Geeks (Leopard)" by
Rothman, Jepson, and Rosen. I don't think there's a Snow Leopard
version out yet.
In answer to Scott's question in another thread, you can run Xwindows
on a Mac, but it isn't accessible to VoiceOver, since it's meant to be
a graphical interface that runs programs on the remote machine, and
displays the results (often graphs, or plots) on your machine through
the Xwindow. You'd have to set up your terminal as an xterm, and then
use a command like:
ssh -X sc...@his_computer to log into the remote machine. I suppose
you could screen capture the Xwindows output and OCR it if it's text,
but it really would require extra work. Just as an example, the Open
Office effort to provide another alternative to MicroSoft Office
products, if you don't want to purchase Apple's iWorks, has two
versions of their software for the Mac. One is written for Xwindows.
The version that VoiceOver users would use is built on the Aqua
Interface to display the results.
Another comment: shell scripting can also easily be brought to the
GUI. Your Mac has an application called "Automator" that's meant to
be a way for the general user to put together workflows of frequently
executed actions without having to learn about shell scripting,
programming, or writing AppleScripts. One of the actions
is "run shell script". Simply drop your shell script into that
action, and you can run the script from the GUI. You can even make it
part of a Finder menu or assign it a shortcut key.
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Aug 28, 2010, at 09:15, Scott Granados wrote:
Yes, you have telnet, ssh, ftp and all the standard clients you'd
expect. I'm sure you could enable daemons to accept connections as
well although consider the security implications of doing that
please.:)
On Aug 28, 2010, at 5:58 AM, Karen Lewellen wrote:
excuse my nose here, but in theory would that let you say tellnet
to a site or service that itself is shell associated?
sorry if I am over guessing what one might do with that sort of
bash. still I would think you could run programs that way?
Karen
On Sat, 28 Aug 2010, Dave Taylor wrote:
I don't know anything about this side of using a Mac at all. Is
there a good
place to learn about it, right from scratch? I'll probably hardly
need it,
but would certainly like to know just in case.
Cheers
Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
[mailto:macvisionar...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Josh Kennedy
Sent: Friday, August 27, 2010 10:36 PM
To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
Subject: the unix shell and mac terminal
Hi
Over the past few weeks I have been running vinux 3.0 lucid in a
virtual
machine and have been playing with it. And then recently I went
into the
terminal on my mac in snow leopard and typed some commands and
surprisingly
I find that most of the commands I can perform in vinux I can also
do with
the terminal or the mac's unix shell. It's really cool. The only
difference
I can see in the mac is that it uses the darwin kernel while vinux
uses the
linux kernel. Oh and guys if you go into a terminal in your mac
and type:
man ls
you can even read the unix man pages there. The only thing that
doesn't work
is apt-get command. I'm not sure if dpkg works or not, I haven't
tried it.
I'll try right now. Well guys dpkg also does not work. The mac's
shell
reminds me very much of vinux 3.0 lucid though.
If you type
uname -a
it will tell you the kernel version among other things.
If you type:
man ls
it will bring up the man page for the ls list directory command.
to quit the
man pages just press the letter q,. To close terminal hit command
q. You can
even hit tab and it will autocomplete commands for you. I imagine
the unix
shell is very powerful, even on the mac. And I'm glad mac uses the
bash
shell. Vinux uses it too. I doubt voxin would work on the mac
since voxin I
think is compiled for the linux kernel and not the darwin
version10 kernel.
Josh Kennedy
jkenn...@gmail.com
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