Chapter 3. Using the Command Line

If you’re a casual Mac user, or even if you’re a hard-core Linux or Unix user, there are a few things about Mac OS X and the particular flavor of Unix under its candylike shell that might catch you off guard. Files and folders behave in rather different ways when you’re addressing them with textual commands than when you’re shoving them around with your mouse. Not only do they look different, they act different, too. You might even say they “think different.”

The shell, which is what we call the command-line environment displayed by the Terminal application, is an austere and cryptic piece of software—about as un-Mac-like as it can possibly get. By the end of this book, you’ll have found all kinds of uses for it—tricks ...

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