A Practical Guide to Unix for Mac OS X Users

Beneath Mac OS®X's stunning graphical user interface (GUI) is the most powerful operating system ever created: UNIX®. With unmatched clarity and insight, this book explains UNIX for the Mac OS X user--giving you total control over your system, so you can get more done, faster. Building on Mark Sobell's highly praised A Practical Guide to the UNIX System, it delivers comprehensive guidance on the UNIX command line tools every user, administrator, and developer needs to master-together with the world's best day-to-day UNIX reference.

This book is packed with hundreds of high-quality examples. From networking and system utilities to shells and programming, this is UNIX from the ground up--both the "whys" and the "hows"--for every Mac user. You'll understand the relationships between GUI tools and their command line counterparts. Need instant answers? Don't bother with confusing online "manual pages": rely on this book's example-rich, quick-access, 236-page command reference!

Don't settle for just any UNIX guidebook. Get one focused on your specific needs as a Mac user!

A Practical Guide to UNIX®for Mac OS® X Users is the most useful, comprehensive UNIX tutorial and reference for Mac OS X and is the only book that delivers

• Better, more realistic examples covering tasks you'll actually need to perform
• Deeper insight, based on the authors' immense knowledge of every UNIX and OS X nook and cranny
• Practical guidance for experienced UNIX users moving to Mac OS X
• Exclusive discussions of Mac-only utilities, including plutil, ditto, nidump, otool, launchctl, diskutil, GetFileInfo, and SetFile
• Techniques for implementing secure communications with ssh and scp--plus dozens of tips for making your OS X system more secure
• Expert guidance on basic and advanced shell programming with bash and tcsh
• Tips and tricks for using the shell interactively from the command line
• Thorough guides to vi and emacs designed to help you get productive fast, and maximize your editing efficiency
• In-depth coverage of the Mac OS X filesystem and access permissions, including extended attributes and Access Control Lists (ACLs)
• A comprehensive UNIX glossary
• Dozens of exercises to help you practice and gain confidence
• And much more, including a superior introduction to UNIX programming tools such as awk, sed, otool, make, gcc, gdb, and CVS