For a while now, the Intel/Unix crowd have looked down on the MacOS because it didn’t have access to a command line interface. But ever since OS X, we can stand proud! Since OS X is based off of FreeBSD, you’ve got full access to all the wonderful Unix features, namely: the command line. What do you do with a command line? I have several common uses for the Terminal.

The text editor pico saves files as ASCII, without the extra control charactors of Apple’s TexEdit, the default editor in MacOS X. It’s my preferred method for editing system text files. The screenshot below shows pico editing /etc/inetd.conf. It controls internet services on MacOS X. Items such as: telnet, ftp server, news server, and more can all be turned on or off here. Apple provides Graphical System Preferences for most of these, but not all.

The Process Status: ps. The command ps -aux | more will display every program running on the computer - not just the ones visible in the Force Quit window. For example, sometimes Classic doesn’t quit cleanly, hanging in limbo. Calling up ps in a Terminal displays the offending program with its PID number (Process ID). Typing kill (PID) terminates the offending application. Below, I show how to kill the Clock.

Another handy program that runs in the Terminal is ping. If I want to get a quick feel for the DSL line, I can ping the server and check the round trip time.

If OS X hangs so badly that the mouse and keyboard are frozen, I can telnet into the computer from another box on the network and either attempt to kill the offending app, or cleanly shutdown the server as shown below.

If you want more info on any of these commands, and most of the commands in any /bin directory, type man (program name) in a terminal.