Man Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Here comes your man (viewer)

by Brett Terpstra (Mar 7th, 2008)

Man pages have been around since before I was born (circa 1971, actually). The people who will take an interest in this post are most likely familiar with the 'man' documentation format for most UNIX commands. While little has changed in the form and function of the man page – besides ...

Monday man page: curl

by Michael Rose (Mar 5th, 2007)

Today's man page covers one of my favorite utilities: curl. No, it's not a haircare product -- it's one of the most flexible download tools in the kit bag, with the ability to handle almost any protocol that can be addressed via a URL (hence the name, short for "client for URLs"). If there's a ...

Monday man page: open

by Michael Rose (Feb 12th, 2007)

Just a quick hint for today's man page: the open command does just what you might think. It opens files, directories, applications or URLs; no muss, no fuss. For files, you can specify an application to open them with the -a flag (or just trust LaunchServices to pick the right app). If you want to, ...

Monday man page: lsof

by Michael Rose (Feb 5th, 2007)

Happy hangover Monday everyone! To soothe those post-big-game blues, here's this week's man page -- lsof, the LiSt Open Files tool. If you're trying to figure out why a removable drive won't unmount or track down a stray outbound network connection, this is the tool for you. Note: If you want to ...

Monday man page: dig, host & nslookup

by Michael Rose (Jan 29th, 2007)

For this week's Monday man page, it's a triple threat: dig, host, and nslookup. All three utilities are included with the BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) version 9 package, part of every Mac OS X 10.4 installation, and all three do pretty much the same task: translate hostnames to IP addresses ...

Monday man page: ls

by Michael Rose (Dec 18th, 2006)

There are two kinds of Mac folk: them that finds this "Terminal" thing strangely fascinating, and them what considers it the worst kind of wicked magic, not to be trifled with. Here at TUAW we've got all kinds, and for anyone who might be curious about the power and possibilities of the command ...