A Practical Guide to UNIX for Mac OS X Users

The Most Useful UNIX Guide for Mac OS X Users Ever, with Hundreds of High-Quality Examples!

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

Mark G. Sobell is president of Sobell Associates Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in UNIX/Linux training, support, and custom software development. He is the author of many best-selling UNIX and Linux books and has more than twenty-five years of experience working with UNIX and Linux.

Peter Seebach, a freelance writer specializing in UNIX development, has published dozens of technical articles for IBM developerWorks.