Maybe I don't understand what you mean, but isn't this what is covered by question #2 ?

I guess it is implicitly indicated yes.

Ok ok... Shame on me for the last post... I looked at post 2 in this thread instead of the Unix FAQ one... Yeah your right... Its very nicely put in that proper thread :rolleyes:

Interesting side note. On Solaris, csh doesn't like "echo $0". It complains that "no file was found for $0". The ps trick worked fine, though.

Now if I could get the chsh command to work, I'd actually be able to change to a useful shell. (Which is a whole long thread in itself, and not really important)

Thanks for the suggestions for the FAQ.
I have now added in sections that respond (at least partially) to all of the suggestions to this point.
Don't hesitate to point out errors or parts that are unclear.

unix vs gui
 

I wonder how to open a window in the OSX GUI for any given "exotic" Unix folder, eg ~/monza/ps-files (monza is a folder in my Home).
Thank you for your work.

I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean how to open a Finder window from the command-line (in Terminal), you can do that with the 'open' command:

open ~/monza/ps-files

But thanks for the reminder - I forgot about the 'open' command when I was making that list of commonly used commands. I'll go add it now.

Hi Hayne, I noticed in the Faq
How can I redirect the output from a command into a file? you mention I wonder if it worth also mentioning the use of >> which as you know will append to a file.

Also in a reply to one of my posts, you reminded me of a useful command option for searching the Man pages.

man -k foo

which maybe handy for others to know.

Thanks

Thanks for the suggestions - I'll add these to the FAQ soon.

Adapt old questions/include a new one about using Standard accounts.
 

Several questions are very nicely addressed, but assume that the user is operating from an Administrator's account. For example, the use of 'sudo' in:
----------
7) What's the deal with permissions? How do I change them?
and
8) How do I gain "root" privileges? Do I need to enable the "root" user?
----------
This is no doubt a good assumption, given that people are operating from the command line, but now that recommendations are to operate from a Standard account, the beginner might run into a roadblock with these.

You probably know the best way to approach this, but possibilities would be:
(1) to say to make sure you're operating from an administrator's account before doing this;
or
(2) to tell how to 'su adminusername' to get administrator's command line privileges temporarily.
or
(3) there is something else I don't know about.

Granted, (3) is guaranteed to be true as a general idea, but I meant that there is another way of operating from a Standard account with all its benefits, and still using 'sudo' from the command line.

Thanks for this wonderful resource.

Good point.
I'll try to add some explanation along the lines you suggested.
Thanks.

Re: How can I tell what shell I am running?

How about using or instead? There's a chance of picking up a similar username when grepping passwd.

That is true, but you'd still be able to pick out which one was yours.
But I added your suggestion of using 'finger' as an alternative way of seeing what shell is assigned to your account.
Note, however, that some corporate installations will have disabled 'finger' on their Macs.