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Originally posted by MacManKrisK:
[...] Oh yeah, most importantly, HOW TO I COMPILE STUFF?!

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There's a lot of good stuff on there, and a good portion of it should be cross platform.

I've personally used console AIM programs, but don't know if they would work on OS X.

As for tips on software.... I'm sure you've heard of it, but in case you haven't, Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs) is an AWESOME editor (mail reader, web browser, tetris implementation, coffee maker )

As for the standard tools, learn to use grep, regular expressions, and shell loops (install Bash if it isn't installed). It can make a lot of tasks easier.

For example, lets say you got a bunch of files from a windows user, and the caps on the files are all mixed up in seemingly random ways, you could write this simple loop to convert them all to lowercase:

for i in *; do
mv $i `echo $i | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`;
done

(of course, this won't work if some of the files have spaces in their names, in that case you'd have to change your field separator (the character that the loop uses to separate each iterator, and by default it's a space, but you could make it a newline (export IFS="<newline>" where <newline> is an actual newline)))

All of this becomes more natuaral the more you use the CLI, but it has many more uses than renaming files, I use a similar loop to resize, scale, and rotate pictures (I sell a lot of stuff on ebay, and though I like the 1200x960 (whatever) pictures my digital camera takes, people seeing our auctions wouldn't like it too much

For manipulating images with the command line, see "convert" and "nconvert". nconvert is a program I found on freshmeat I think, and convert is from ImageMagick.

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Originally posted by TheAnnoyedCockroach:
Lucky you. I can't even get my computer to connect to the internet in Linux.

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That's one advantage to Mac OS X, I set everything up in the nice, pretty GUI and THEN I went over to the Console. I also don't use PPP from the terminal, I get online through a firewall so I just connect through eth0.

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Originally posted by TheAnnoyedCockroach:
Lucky you. I can't even get my computer to connect to the internet in Linux.

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Why not?

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Originally posted by RedHatDude:
For example, lets say you got a bunch of files from a windows user, and the caps on the files are all mixed up in seemingly random ways, you could write this simple loop to convert them all to lowercase:

for i in *; do
mv $i `echo $i | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`;
done

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Doesn't Red Hat have the "rename" command? It's a perl script, and in Debian it comes with the standard perl packages. Quoth the man page:

code:

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       To translate uppercase names to lower, you'd use
               rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

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quote:

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(of course, this won't work if some of the files have spaces in their names, in that case you'd have to change your field separator [...]

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The rename script can handle that.

Remember, when the shell expands a wildcard, each argument is passed to the program separately, even if the argument contains internal spaces. So rename 's/ /_/g' *.mp3 will rename all MP3 files in the current directory, changing spaces to underscores. (If you care about such things. Personally, I like the spaces in the file names.)

The only time you have to worry about spaces in file names is when you're writing shell scripts. In general, you almost always need to enclose file name variables in double quotes, thus:

code:

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find . -name '*.mp3' -print | while read f; do
  something somethng "$f"
done

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But the reason I mentioned changing the field sep. was that my example used a for loop, and that's required for for loops (you could use a while loop with the read command I suppose).

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Originally posted by RedHatDude:
As for tips on software.... I'm sure you've heard of it, but in case you haven't, Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs) is an AWESOME editor (mail reader, web browser, tetris implementation, coffee maker

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(it just has to be done)

No, not Emacs! Use vi! It is the only true *NIX text editor!

(there, now I feel better)

Actually, I'm very text-editor agnostic, but the Emacs/vi war is just too good to NOT continue....

Stormtalon

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Those who are easily offended should be.

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Originally posted by Stormtalon:
Actually, I'm very text-editor agnostic, but the Emacs/vi war is just too good to NOT continue....

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Alright, I'm putting a stop to this RIGHT NOW! I used to be reasonably vim-savvy, but I havn't used UNIX systems at all since I left Michigan Tech over....2 years ago now; so I lost all I learned about vim (:q what?) Emacs is just silly too with the escape stuff and the "Meta" key and all that.... bah!

I shall end this war with one word: pico

I only really used *NIX apps during my second year of my course at university; I'm on work placement now, so it's Win32 and Mac OS for me now.

Anyhow, Emacs' C/Java auto-indenting is insufferable (OK, it's probably configurable somehow), so that ruled out Emacs altogether. For some reason I never tried vi; a friend and I did look at the X version of it, and we were in hysterics over the keyboard shortcuts (never seen anything so stupid in our lives!).

However, yes, pico's nice (I think, been a while since I used that, too). Also, the ash editor is a funny little thing :)

However, I'm all for BBEdit these days, offers format colour-coding like X Emacs without re-laying out all your work out of spite :)

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For some reason I never tried vi; a friend and I did look at the X version of it, and we were in hysterics over the keyboard shortcuts (never seen anything so stupid in our lives!).

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They won't seem so stupid the next time you find yourself using a dumb terminal that doesn't have arrow keys on it, connecting to a Unix host over a 1200 baud modem.

What's that you say? They got 2400 baud modems now? Well, dad-gum! I'm gonna have to git me an upgrade!

Seriously, vi is meant to run on anything. If your first exposure to Unix was the X window system, you're missing a lot of the historical basis for Unix and its quirks.

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greycat
They won't seem so stupid the next time you find yourself using a dumb terminal that doesn't have arrow keys on it, connecting to a Unix host over a 1200 baud modem.
...
If your first exposure to Unix was the X window system, you're missing a lot of the historical basis for Unix and its quirks.
...
And from there, it's a slippery slope to using h,j,k,l instead of the arrow keys in vi.

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Ah, that is to say, the X version of vi is consistent with the terminal version. Makes perfect sense, but still not something I'm after, although I am familiar with key combinations for movement.

In fact, on older Macs that lacked extended keyboards, home, end, page up and page down (scrolling, not cursor control) were achieved by four key combinations, ^A, ^D, ^K and ^L, or something very much like that. (Those still work even now, don't they? In Classic, at least).

Given that arrow keys are indeed available on my home machine, I think I'd just edit files in a more modern-styled terminal-mode editor (such as pico, or whatever I think of at the time) in a terminal window in X.

As for X vs terminal, I think I actually used Telnet before X-Windows, but not by much.

Oh, and game keys... I tended to stick with arrows when I used to play games on my 486, but games like Descent needed all sorts of other keys set up, and it got nasty :) X-Wing was almost as bad, but at least you couldn't strafe, so there was no concern about keyboard+mouse vs two-hands-on-keyboard nonsense.

Probably the worst I've seen is Acornsoft Aviator, which seemed to do something with every single key on the keyboard (albeit only a small BBC Micro keyboard) ("Memorise That!"). BBC games, though, did tend to not use the arrow keys, movement was usually Z,X,/,' or A,Z,",","." for four-way movement, Z,X or Caps Lock,Ctrl for sideways movement (plus other keys for thrust, fire etc. as needed) :) Fun fun, heh?

quote:

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Originally posted by Stormtalon:
the Emacs/vi war is just too good to NOT continue....

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