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Dig Into Unix: Sed and Awk

Written on August 11, 2009 by Jon Buys and 12 people have commented

Time again to pop a shell and dig into the deep, geeky Unix internals of OS X with Dig Into Unix. Today we are going to look at two top-shelf power tools for text editing: sed and awk.
Sed is a Stream EDitor, and if you recall our previous Dig Into Unix installment concerning standard streams, [...]

Tips & Tricks: What’s Your Alias?

Written on July 13, 2009 by Chris Ryan and 10 people have commented

Aliases in Mac OS X are essentially equivalent to shortcuts in the Windows world. They work by creating a link to an original file located somewhere on your Mac or network and maintain the link even if the original is moved or renamed.
How to Create Aliases
Creating aliases is pretty easy. You can right-click on a [...]

Dig Into Unix: vi

Written on June 23, 2009 by Jon Buys and 17 people have commented

Continuing our Dig Into Unix series, we’ve now covered the absolute basics of launching Terminal.app, moving around the file system, looking at files with cat, and learning about commands with man. Now, I’d like to introduce you to the power of vi.
vi (pronounced vee-eye) is a text editor for the command line, and was originally [...]

It’s the Little Things: Command Line Improvements to Mac OS X

Written on May 21, 2009 by Tom Reestman and 7 people have commented

Recently, two articles appeared on TechRadar documenting various command line tweaks for various apps and functions of Mac OS X. While I didn’t find anything new there, it’s nice to have two articles that summarize a bunch instead of tracking them down one by one across countless bookmarks.
To be honest, most command line tweaks don’t [...]

My Holy Grail Of iPhone Apps Arrives: pTerm

Written on August 08, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 18 people have commented

Just this week I was posing the question of where are all the (no-jailbreak-required) ssh/terminal apps for the iPhone? While not the best platform for such a tool (the keyboard would – and does, as you will see – eat up some serious real estate), the platform has enough processing power to handle such [...]

Tales From The Command Line: Where Has My Bandwidth Gone? (iftop & SurplusMeter)

Written on July 03, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 11 people have commented

I believe I can safely say that the primary objective for users running OS X is to connect to the Internet to read mail, check out web sites, chat with friends, download new apps or grab/share multi-media content, etc. With bandwidth caps staring to become all the rage by the mega-providers, knowing how much you [...]

Invisibility and Metadata

Written on March 13, 2008 by Stephanie Guertin and 9 people have commented

I normally avoid anything that looks like tech support in my entries here, but this may verge on an exception. Bear with me, and I’ll explain.
I rebooted my Macbook Pro about four days ago, and lo, to my surprise, the icon for my boot drive had vanished. I was, too say the [...]

Hidden Gems In Leopard: OpenSnoop

Written on January 14, 2008 by Bob Rudis and 6 people have commented

I have a confession to make: I have not always been a Mac person. For the period of time between the retirement of System 9 and Panther (yes, it took Apple showing a real commitment to Unix for me to give them a shot again), I abandoned our fine operating system for greener pastures, well, [...]