Chapter 17. Introducing Darwin and the Shell

Running behind the slick Mac OS X Aqua GUI is Darwin, the POSIX-compliant operating system that forms the foundation of Mac OS X. Included in Darwin is a collection of many powerful tools that are not only used by many functions of Mac OS X, but are also available for you to use. The most direct way to interact with Darwin and take full advantage of all these wonderfully powerful UNIX tools is through the use of the Terminal application (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal). When Terminal is launched, it opens up a terminal window running a shell program, as shown in Figure 17-1.

The Terminal application running in Mac OS X

Figure 17.1. The Terminal ...

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