Unix Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

The 25-year-old BSD bug

by Robert Palmer (May 13th, 2008)

Today in 1983, "Beat It" by Michael Jackson may have topped the charts, but a slight bug in the *dir() library was found only a few days ago by OpenBSD developer Marc Balmer (no rela -- oh, wait). OS News has the entire amusing tale of the bug in BSD (the UNIX foundation of Mac OS X) that's been ...

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 ...

New eBook explains Leopard's permissions

by Dave Caolo (Feb 25th, 2008)

Despite John Gruber's longstanding assertion that "Repair Disk Permissions is voodoo," Brian Tanaka has published "Take Control of Permissions in Leopard" for the Take Control series of eBooks. It's part troubleshooting (how to delete stuck files, for example), part tips and tricks (the best ways to ...

Terminal Tips: creating a Spotlight-based gallery

by Brett Terpstra (Feb 15th, 2008)

As sexy as Leopard is to me, I'm just as enamored with the powerful UNIX underpinnings of the operating system. I've been toying with a few ways to combine a couple of my favorite command line utilities into something that might prove useful. I won't claim I've achieved a truly practical usage yet, ...

Cocktail Tiger edition goes to 4.0.1, Leopard edition 4.0.2

by Mike Schramm (Jan 26th, 2008)

Just in case you haven't yet upgraded to Leopard, but still love using Cocktail (that crazy mix of Unix functions for OS X), Maintain has released version 4.0.1 of their Tiger edition. They've fixed some compatibility problems with QuickTime, and added support for clearing font caches in Microsoft ...

Apple releases Darwin 9.0, Unix foundation of Leopard

by Mat Lu (Nov 10th, 2007)

Back when the Intel Macs first appeared there was a delay from Apple in releasing Darwin 8, the open-source BSD/Unix foundation of Tiger. Crazy theories were adduced, and bad intentions attributed to Apple, but eventually Darwin 8 for Intel Macs was released. Apple seems to have moved even faster ...

iPhone BSD package updated

by Erica Sadun (Oct 9th, 2007)

iPhone developer NerveGas has updated his BSD subsystem in preparation for the new iPhone jailbreak. This new release offers tighter code fixes ("less cruft"), a few additions and a few omissions of less useful items. He also removed libarmfp dependencies. In other words, this release brings iPhone ...

Play Audio URLs from the iPhone Command Line

by Erica Sadun (Aug 17th, 2007)

You never know when instant karma is gonna getcha. Take my playaudio application. Yesterday, I was chatting with some developer buddies about maybe putting together an Internet radio application and discussing the fact that the Celestial iPhone framework is essentially QuickTime repackaged. While ...

Leopard achieves UNIX 03 certification

by Mat Lu (Aug 1st, 2007)

Not being an enterprise IT guy, this story went a little past me, but it's apparently big news to some. With Leopard, Apple has now joined Sun, IBM, and HP as the only four OS vendors to achieve UNIX 03 certification. This is significant because it opens up some interesting possibilities for Apple ...

ssh on iPhone

by Erica Sadun (Jul 23rd, 2007)

Over at the #iphone channel at irc.osx86.hu, the thoroughly awesome NerveGas has figured out how to enable ssh on the iPhone without using restore mode. The secret lies in overwriting an existing binary and plist to trick the iPhone into calling chmod on the Dropbear ssh server and making it ...

There and back again: How I broke into the iPhone UNIX files and lived to tell about it

by Erica Sadun (Jul 14th, 2007)

Yesterday, I took my iPhone hacking to the next level. After reading through these instructions at HackTheiPhone.com, I downloaded a copy of jailbreak and broke into the iPhone UNIX file system. ...

ChangeShortName updated to 1.3

by Michael Rose (May 30th, 2007)

A few weeks ago, in discussing some things not to do with your Mac, one of our commenters asked why changing the shortname (the abbreviated version of your username you see in Terminal, as the name of your 'home folder' or in Get Info windows) is such a nasty bit of business on Mac OS X. Shouldn't ...

Phynchronicity: Fink GUI

by Mat Lu (Apr 14th, 2007)

Everybody knows that at the heart of OS X lies a powerful UNIX/BSD installation, but actually installing UNIX software can be a bit of pain, requiring command line trickery at least, and sometimes even compiling from the source (and dealing with dependencies, etc.). Fortunately, the Fink package ...

Terminal Tip: Accessing built-in calendars

by Erica Sadun (Apr 12th, 2007)

On Sunday, I posted about the built-in calendars found in /usr/share/calendar. These calendars include listings of events from around the world and for religions, e.g. calendar.history and calendar.christian. Today, I thought I'd share some ways to access those calendars from the command line. On ...

Terminal Tip: the joy of nl

by Erica Sadun (Apr 9th, 2007)

Too often overlooked, nl provides a very useful shell command. As you can see here, when issued, it numbers the lines of a text file. But that's certainly not all that this little utility can do. My favorite feature allows you to count the occurrences of a regular expression. Use the -bp flag to ...