Release your inner geek and harness the power of the Unix underpinnings to Mac OS X! This 167-page ebook from Joe Kissell explains everything you need to know to become comfortable working on the command line in Terminal, and provides numerous “recipes” for performing useful tasks. Other filesystem problems are more subtle, and are due to different semantic expectations made by Mac OS and Unix systems as well as implementation details. One example of this is the delete semantics of Mac OS as compared to the unlink semantics of Unix. In Mac OS, if you try to delete a file which someone else has open, the delete fails. The operating system your MacBook runs, OS X, is built on top of UNIX, and Terminal provides you with access to the underlying UNIX system commands. Most server software that your business would.

1. How To Program For Loops In Mac Os Unix Directories Link
2. Program For Loops In C

Home Directory (~) Unix is a multi-user operating system (although most of you, in particular the Mac users, use it as a single-user personal computer). Each user on the system is allocated a directory for storing his files, known as home directory. Oct 07, 2009  Under UNIX I have a folder where files will be placed frequently and I need to upload those files to Oracle, what I need is a UNIX script that can do the following Loop through Directory '/home/applmgr/snktmp' Picks only files Pass the file name to parameter &1 Pass the.

How To Program For Loops In Mac Os Unix Directories Link

I installed an application and now I can access it via terminal as myapplication. It is an alias, though. How can I find the full path to the file?

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5 Answers

You can use type and which to determine what a certain command in bash is, and, if it's an application, where it resides.

The commands which and type -P only work for programs on your PATH, of course, but you won't be able to run others by just typing their command name anyway.

If you're looking for a simple way to determine where an OS X (GUI) application bundle is installed (as used e.g. by the open command), you can execute the following short AppleScript from the command line:

Program For Loops In C

This requires that the program in question (Safari in the example) is running.

Rich HomolkaDaniel Beck♦Daniel Beck

This is the method I currently to locate the Firefox application directory in OSX and Linux. Should be easy to adopt to another application. Tested on OSX 10.7, Ubuntu 12.04, Debian Jessie

The path of binaries is referenced in the $PATH variable.

You can see its content with env.

slhck

You can use 'alias' command in terminal to list all of your aliases. Or if you are in a directory you can use 'pwd' to show your current path.

If you know the filename or a part of filename, then you can use 'find' to locate your file.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged macosterminal or ask your own question.

Click to viewThat Mac you're viewing this web page on using a pretty graphical interface? That's a Unix-based system which can run the powerful and age old command line utilities of the most advanced Unix beard. If you've never launched the Terminal, you're missing out on a plethora of Unix tools that offer more control and options than any dialog box possibly could. We've covered some basic Unix command line techniques in the past, but today we've got a few more for folks who want to start their Unix ninja training from the comfort of their own Mac.

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Replace Terminal with iTerm

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The first stop in your foray into Mac OS X command line goodness is getting yourself a proper terminal. While all the commands we'll discuss will work just fine in the built-in Terminal.app (located in /Applications/Utilities), the free, open source iTerm is a definite improvement over vanilla Terminal. Mostly because it supports tabbed sessions, which lets you run several tasks in various tabs without taking up screen real estate. Download iTerm here (free). iTerm tab hint: once you've got more than one tab open, use the Ctrl+Right/Left arrow to move between them.

The Basics

We've already posted a series of beginner's guides to the command line for Windows users running the Unix emulator Cygwin. This is the beauty and advantage of being comfortable at the Unix command line: learn commands once and they'll work most anywhere—on Mac, in Windows/Cygwin, and in most flavors of any Unix-based system. So instead of traversing ground we've already covered, hit up our past tutorials instead (and ignore all the Cygwin-specific stuff):

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• Introduction to Cygwin—Print the working directory with pwd, create new files with touch my-new-file.txt, and list all the files in a directory with ls.
  
• More useful commands—File listing command options (like ls -lh), aliasing common commands to save typing (like alias 'ls'='ls -lh'), append text to files with >>, see the contents of files with cat, search file contents with grep, using your command history and RTFM'ing with man.
  
• Scripts, packages and more—Logging onto other computers remotely from the command line using ssh and scripting collections of commands for easy execution.

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While almost the entire recipe box of established Unix commands work on OS X, there are also a few Mac-specific command line tools that hook into Spotlight, access your iPod and other external disks, launch Mac graphical applications and install more open source applications. Let's take a look.

Launch Applications and Documents

The open command can open up a certain file in its associated application (like open lifehacker.doc will launch Word with lifehacker.doc open) or it can launch a specific application. To open a document, you've got to be in the directory where that document lives; to launch an application, use the -a option to tell Mac OS X to look in the Applications folder. For example, open -a ichat will launch iChat no matter what directory you're in. Using previously-mentioned aliases, you could map the command ichat='open -a ichat' in your .bash_profile to save yourself some keystrokes, too.

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Access Files on Your iPod (and Other External Volumes)

Now that you know how to navigate folders and subfolders and file listings, you may want to use your new command line knowledge to check out external disks connected to your Mac, like your iPod. Mac OS X lists all external drives in the /Volumes/ directory. So to get there, type cd /Volumes/ and hit Enter. Then a quick ls will list the available drives. Here I've got an iPod (with disk use enabled in iTunes) called 'Terra's iPod' connected to the Mac. Move into it using cd Terra's iPod (you can use the Tab key after T to autocomplete the volume name, which is a little screwy because of the apostrophe) and then ls the directories there. Your iPod's music is stored in the /iPod_Control/Music directory, so you can cd there to see how all your music shows up:

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Sadly your music is stored in folders with non-obvious names, like F00-F49. cd into any one of those directories and you'll see similarly-named music files. To copy those files back to your Mac's internal hard drive, a simple cp command would get the job done.

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Access, Search and List Spotlight File Metadata

Mac OS X's built-in file search system Spotlight indexes a lot more than just file names and contents. It builds an index of metadata like file type, author, times and dates and other information, like artist and album for properly tagged music files and camera model information for digital photos. Using the mdls command, you can list Spotlight's metadata for a file and using mdfind, search for files that only match certain criteria. For example, to see the metadata for a Word document, I'd do an mdls filename.doc, as shown:

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To see other documents authored by Marcia, I'd use the mdsfind command with the filtering parameter 'kMDItemAuthors 'Marcia Ellett':

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Install Open Source Software with Fink

The Fink Project ports open source Unix software to run on Mac OS X's Darwin and makes that software available for download to your Mac in a simple command. Once you download and install Fink, you can use the sudo apt-get install emacs, for instance, to install the classic Emacs editor. Or you can browse the list of available packages in Fink using the free Fink Commander graphical interface, which looks like this:

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More Fun Stuff

Other Unix fun to be had on your Mac (or any *nix system) includes:

• Encrypt your web browsing session with an SSH tunnel
  
• Automatically download entire web sites, new music and more by mastering wget
  
• Run a personal, home SSH server
  
• Customize your command prompt (like my pictured prompt, 'Your wish is my command')

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Further Reading

For more on Unix for Mac users, check out Dave Taylor's excellent book, Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger, which inspired and informed this article.

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How do you use the Unix goodness baked into your Mac? Let us know in the comments.

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Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, loves herself some Terminal activity. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.