good unix reference
 

hello,

i am new to unix and the terminal and am eager to learn more.
can you guys recommend your favorite references and resources for unix. an o'reilly book (without out being to complicated for a newbie)?
or is the best thing to just read the 'man' pages?

is it possible to read the 'man' pages not in the terminal?

any tips on what you find usefull and worthwhile greatly appreciated.
thank you

In my little opinion the man pages are dense, sometimes cryptic and practically unreadable. Be that as it may, there's good information there if you care to take the time. I went through a bunch of man pages by typing a character--say 'a'--in the terminal and then hitting the tab key. That'll bring up all the commands that start with the letter a. Then type, for example (being sure to delete the 'a' already on your command line),

man apropros

and hit return. Voila!

The best newbie reference out there in my opinion (since I bought it, natch) is Unix Visual Quickstart Guide, by Deborah S. Ray and Eric J. Ray (Peachpit Press, 1998).

That book will get you through all the basics and start you on shell scripting if you're so inclined (I'm not--yet). It's well-written in a nice, casual, conversational tone that won't put you off with its geekiness. Highly recommended.

Andy

This isn't a direct answer to your question, but I thought it might be a helpful suggestion anyway (I hope so, at least...).

Do you have a local community college near you? I took a Linux/Unix class at our local community college, Parkland College. It only cost me 45 bucks (and good books on the subject can cost that much, if not more), and I took the class "on-line," i.e., I never actually went to the college for the class.

I don't know everything there is to know, obviously, about either Unix or Linux, but I got my feet wet, and became comfortable enough to navigate around and, more importantly, perhaps understand more of why things work the way they do.

Again, just a thought. :)

G.--

Try this book . O'Reilly books are high quality, well written, and in some cases (read Randal Schwartz's Perl books) highly amusing, too.

Eric

Mac OS X Unleashed
 

before you go wasting good money on books that may or may not service you, google for unix tutorials.

that way, you can see what you're getting yourself into, and perhaps how to spot the bad books if you're inclined to pursue your course.

I was just about to say money spent on a book is never wasted, but then I remembered that I bought Teach Yourself C in 21 Days several years ago and never read it.

Andy

i agree... to a certain extent. i have no problem with online tutorials and find them very helpful and economical. and it's great to be able to copy and paste text and commands to test things out.
but i must say that with more complex subjects i do enjoy having a book as a reference to read in more detail. after spending all day on the computer at work and then coming home to spend more time on the computer i just simply get tired reading for a long time on a screen.

in the past i have been satisfied with the o'reilly books. and the peachpit vis. quickstart guides are mostly great... but i often find that i read them and understand them and then need something more and i can't really use it as a reference later on - a great help for starting to learn a specific program though.

thank you for all of your suggestions. i will check them out.

this looks promising, thanks. i like o'reilly books. and i like the idea that it is taylored toward mac osx.

that is a good idea. often they can be good courses and relatively cheap.
i am currently living in switzerland though and the thought of taking a unix class in german scares me!

i too have found the man pages a bit difficult. i did figure out how to read them in bbedit though, much better.

i like the tab-key tip. i didn't know that.

note that i didn't say "don't use books." i merely suggest that you educate yourself a little so you can attempt to avoid obviously bad books, of which there are myriad.

here, there is a stack of books as tall as i am which are considered the five star essential publications on the subjects. several of them open at any given time.

also, here, is a much shorter stack that are atrocious publications only good for leveling wobbly furniture. "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days" being one of them.

do a little homework and you'll get less burnt by borked books.

of course. sorry i didn't mean to suggest that you were bookless or anti-book... rather i was more trying to instill my love of the book.
anyway, i agree with your advice... thank you.

I can't get the tab auto complete to work when typing in app names in the terminal. It works for locations, but not app names. :(

tab?
 

same situation here

Just in case: that would be terminal apps, not Aqua/MacOS apps. As in: you can run "lsof", but not say "Photoshop" or "TextEdit".



V

Edit: well actually you can, you can use the command "open". man open for info.

Re: Learning UNIX
 

I do not think i saw it mentioned here so I thought it might be of interest to you.

http://www.osxfaq.com

I have found this site to be a wealth of information on UNIX for OSX.

They have a tutorial section that offers lessons for newbies to advanced users.

They also have all the man pages listed for your viewing pleasure.

Have fun:D

vonleigh, yes you are correct. I suppose I wasn't clear in that tip above that the tab trick only works with Terminal commands.

The "open" command is a beauty, though. Newbies try this in Terminal:

open /applications/clock.app

...and see what happens. One thing you have to remember when you're in the Terminal is that EVERYTHING is path-based. You have to know the specific path of any file or application before you can do anything with it. You also have to know the exact name of the file or application you're opening. By default, for instance, you don't see the file extension ".app" in the Finder for Clock.app. It does show up if you type

ls /applications

It can all get very cumbersome and is, if I recall correctly, while we all hated DOS and used Macs lo, those many moons ago. Ironic that we're doing this now, no?

Sorry to stray off topic...

Andy

the open command is a bit special in regards to the above. it scans for apps in the appropriate places with the -a switch...

the following work:

% open -a clock

% open -a "disk utility"

% open -a disk\ utility

Ooh, dat's nice!

Love learning new things. Thanks, Merv! (again)

Andy

... and 'open http://www.apple.com/' opens the URL in the right browser.

right out of man open pages!

But *why* not? It's nice to be able to type "graphi" then tab in the terminal so that your shell completes the output to "graphicconverter", and then hit return to open GraphicConverter. Similarly nice to be able to enter --say--

% neti<tab>m<tab>

and have it completed to netinfomanager, then have it open upon return. See an old and very rambling thread for a script to do just this if you're interested. Most of my scriptural diarrhoea at the start can be safely ignored unless you're looking to kill some time in a semi-interesting manner! Just use the second version of the long script, and substitute the two lines from the last post on the first page of that thread (so that "Disk Copy.app" becomes "diskcopy" and so forth).

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...ghlight=davros

As above, if you've already "passed" on that script then ignore this message!

Cheers,
Paul

Wow. Paul that's some post, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it. Thanks in advance!

Hey! I have that book. I actually did read it. I bought it while taking a class in C programming. The main reason I got it was that I bought the version that had a compiler, so that I could do homework at home and not at the college computer lab. It's actually a pretty helpful book (as far as those "teach yourself" books goes...).

Right now it serves me well too. I have a 19" and 17" monitor at work, and the book is just the right thickness to sit under the 17" monitor and make the top of it even with the 19".

:D

G.--

Mac OS X (pocket reference) & Learning UNIX for Mac OS X
 

Here are two books reviewed, for those interested.

>> Right now it serves me well too. I have a 19" and 17" monitor at work, and the book is just the right thickness to sit under the 17" monitor and make the top of it even with the 19".

So it is in fact true that money spent on books is never wasted!

Andy

my UNIX bible
 

I was new to UNIX. I got the book Sams teach yourself UNIX in 24 hours. It's been worth every penny spent. Easy lessons teach you how to do things that ordinary people want to do. for other stuff, i just search the net.

I have "learning Unix for Mac Os X" which I think is a waste of time if you know anything about Unix already. It takes a chapter to explain what a directory a file are. Its also small, so there's loads of interesting things mentioned, followed by "but we won't go into that in this small book". If you are very new to UNIX , this would be a great starting point though, as its nicely written.

I also have "Mac OS X unleashed" which is fantastic and has everything in.