Apple Pro Training Series: OS X Lion Support Essentials

Appendix B. Command-Line Essentials

The analogy goes like this: You can spend your entire life driving cars without having any idea how to fix them, but if you plan on being a mechanic, then you need to know how things work under the hood. The same is true of OS X Lion: You can spend years using Macs without having any idea how to fix them, but if you plan to administer and troubleshoot issues, you need to know how things work “under the hood.” In the case of Lion, because UNIX is what provides the foundational technologies, “under the hood” means working with the command-line interface.

First, there are a great many indispensable management and troubleshooting tools that are available only at the command line. And once you become comfortable ...