Mac OS Terminal commands
I am writing today about Mac OS Terminal commands. I’m trying to learn Unix. I’m trying to learn the Mac OS command line terminal. Back in the 90s. When you got the first PC, you might remember that you had to run DOS commands in a terminal to start programs.
When I was a kid, I wanted to play video games, video game installation systems for Windows PCs. They’re all dos-based systems. I had to put in the disk and then go into DOS, change it from the C drive to the D drive, and then do some command line thing that I did not understand all the time.
Those directions were over my head. It was frustrating. I remember just having frustrations about trying to get command lines to work. I’ve gotten into computers when I was young. I figured out some DOS. But, I was never proficient in it. I can never really move about a file system and a command line before.
I didn’t know about the Mac OS terminal. I know Darwin was based on Unix. The Unix file handling system is the same way that Linux is based on that. Unix is the old command-line system of file management that was set up like a file cabinet system.
I am getting a bit more understanding about how to get practical use out of a Macintosh computer. It was excellent learning a few commands in Terminal. I installed a new shell in the Terminal called fish.
When you first get started with Shell or the Terminal on Mac, it’s the bash shell. BASH came out in the 70s. I installed an updated shell that gives me a couple of different color modifiers. It helps fill in helps autocomplete some of them that you’re trying to do on the command line, which saves a ton of time and makes sure my syntax is way easier because I don’t know what I’m doing. For example, I don’t know when to put a space. Do I put a dash and then a space? Or not?
The auto-completion of a more modern shell that you install on top of that makes a big difference. It takes time. You can type in man, man. And that’ll bring up the manual for Unix or all the Unix commands.
The best way is to go to YouTube and follow a tutorial to learn some basic commands. One of the basic ones that I’ve learned is CD. For the change directory, that’s how you move from one folder to the following folder. The other part I’ve been learning is Homebrew, which is a package manager; it’s you can download programs from the internet. Or you can download additional utilities or applications into the Terminal and then run them from Terminal.
One of the exciting commands that I thought was the sips command, and you can probably look that up. A man sips man space sit for the manual for the command, sips, but that’s that a Macintosh image processing. If you have a directory of images and want to resize those for the web, you can type the command: sips space and the folder’s name or the size of pixels. And then the name of the folder, and it would process in the command line. It would process all those images to be resized to that format and to that size. I experimented with five-megapixel photos, and then I would drop those down to 400 width pixels that I could put up on a website. I could take the folder, write the command, then see it process out all those images, and it’s interesting seeing your computer work.
There are ways you can get your Mac OS apps. You can get those through the Terminal.
Some packages are pretty old. They’re 20 or 25 years old.
I downloaded a terminal email program that was a command-line email program called Alpine.
It was made by the University of Washington back in 2001.
There is an extensive directory of software available in Homebrew. There are all different formulas, there are mp3 players, and there are file converters, there are video converters, MPEG converters, there are system utilities, there’s disk usage, utilities, There are networking utilities. There are games like I installed Zork, I installed Tetris.
A whole, functioning computer system existed without the graphical user interface that we put much time into. So I’ve been trying to learn a little bit of productivity out of it, too, because there’s, I would ever do this. But there are some exciting things that you can do.
There’s still a whole range of uses, applications, and systems that people get into quite profoundly. When you’re trying to get into powerful tools, you move into Terminal and into everything you can do in Unix.
Mac OS Terminal commands
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