Introduction to Unix ?

[JC Helary]

I just sent this mail to another OSX related group and thought it could be of interest to some members here too.


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I just realized that I had been away from this group for a while now... I checked the archives and saw a lot of familiar names. I'm really happy to be back here.

Which makes me think that I am currently writing an introduction to Unix on OSX for a French publisher and I'd like to know how much professional users of OSX who mostly deal with text interact with Terminal and other Unixy aspects of OSX (I include regexp here but not really X11).

Personally, I find that I mostly use Terminal to checkout the OmegaT code repository so that I can test the latest code, to launch OmegaT with a Japanese or English tokenizer depending on my source language, to output the result of ls so that I can have list of files for invoicing etc. I use it to launch Rainbow too, because double-clicking on the launch file does not seem to work...

I've created a few sed commands with piping to interact with OmegaT output and I wrote a perl script a long time ago to glue 2 files together with TMX tags. I've also tried to manage my schedule with cal and calendar, instead of iCal, I edit a few files with vi sometimes too. There are plenty of utilities (sort, uniq, diff, paste, grep) that I used once in a while but I can't really say they are part of my work flow.

So, what about the other members of this list ? Have you included Terminal in your workflow somehow ? Do you find utilities there useful ? What are the "concepts" that were the most alien when you started to deal with the Unix side of Mac ?




Jean-Christophe Helary (JA/EN > FR)
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/brandelune
http://www.doublet.jp

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Jean-Christophe Helary

[Steph Morriss]

Hi Jean-Christophe,

Before becoming a translator I was a telecom software engineer so I
was quite familiar with Unix. I bought my first Mac when I realized
that I could easily open a Terminal and run all my Unix commands. I
like this flexibility...and I like to leave my computer on for days or
weeks without having to reboot or having it crash on me at a critical
time.

Now I use mostly Mac applications (Mail, iCal, addressBook )and
Microsoft Office (MS Word 2004 + wordfast and Excel). I use
Applescript and Automator to automate my workflow and the interactions
between applications.

I use a couple of bash and Perl scripts for my personal use (rename
and archive pictures, generate photo album to publish on the web)

The main work related things I use are:
- a script running rsync to backup my work files into our file server.
- ncftp : It seems much more efficient for me than graphical ftp tools
I tried.

My favorite mac/Unix integration feature:
I really like to drag a file from the Finder (or a picture from
Preview) into my Terminal to get the complete path to that file. When
I use ncftp for example I just type 'put' and drag the files I want
to upload. It's really fast and more reliable than my typing.

Initially I was using Fink, XDarwin etc but nowadays I use only
standard OS X applications or things that run in the terminal.


Stephanie

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[JC Helary]

Thank you Stephanie for your reply.

I'm finding that the current setting keeps people from shifting smoothly between Terminal (as a file system interface + command interpreter) and Finder. Anytime I have to process a text file in Terminal and find myself in Finder, I have to manually call Terminal and process the file from there.

I do that with a utility that's called ">cd to ....app" by James Tuley. I call it from Spotlight by hitting Ctrl+Space and then ">". Then I am in terminal with the working directory on my Finder directory.

Since a lot of my Terminal commands are really one liners, I find it a waste of time to have to call Terminal that way, or even put it on the foreground with either Spotlight or Cmd+Tab.

Today I just remembered that there was another utility that created a floating command line with a shortcut. It it called Dterm and I've been playing with it for a few hours now.

When I want to process a file from Finder, I call Dterm and I can launch a command with the Finder folder as the work directory. It is possible to launch a command in Terminal.

Si, if I want to create a text file in a folder, I get Dterm, type "vi file.txt" hit Cmd+return and I get vi in a Terminal window. When I save the file, it is created in the folder.

The main difference between Dterm and Terminal proper is that Terminal is an application on its own and requires to be put in the background to proceed with other tasks, while Dterm can be dismissed with [Esc]. The calling procedure to get a wd on the foremost Finder window is also slightly longer with Terminal.

It makes much more sense now to create aliases for native applications when you want to open a file with an application different from its default application:

open -a Textwrangler -> tw
open -a TextEdit ->te
open -a Aquamacs\ Emacs ->ae
open -a Microsoft\ Word ->msw
open -a Pages -> pa
open -a OpenOffice.org -> ooo

for ex.

(bash aliases in OSX seem to have to be in .bash_profile to be recognized though).

etc...

Jean-Christophe