21–30 of 243 posts
What always surprises me is that so many don't know or use the directory stack commands, pushd and popd. I'll admit I was also ignorant of them until something like 2005, but once I learned of them I switched and never looked back. Now I can't see someone write or type "cd" without a little bit of a cringe.
/usr/local is the default location for user-installed stuff, but I personally like to have my package manager do its stuff in a separate directory. I like the way Fink [1] uses the /sw (software) directory. Does anyone have a valuable opinion on the comparison between Fink and Homebrew — or maybe MacPorts? [1] http://www.finkproject.org
no love for macport?
One tiny thing though, at the bottom it says
> Recall that OS X apps are not true executables, but actually special directories (bundles) with the extension .app. open is the only way to launch these programs from the command line.
Actually, you can launch them in other ways. Example
/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --user-data-dir=/Users//temp/delmechrome --no-first-run
open /Applications/Safari.app/
open -a safari
Great list! Includes all the old favorites with clear explanations. This is only tangentially related, but I recently wrote a little Automator Service to gather any selected file and folder paths from Finder. I very often need to grab the path of something for programming-related stuff, and doing it from the command line or with the mini-icon drag-and-drop takes way too long. Maybe somebody here will find it useful!…
What always surprises me is that so many don't know or use the directory stack commands, pushd and popd. I'll admit I was also ignorant of them until something like 2005, but once I learned of them I switched and never looked back. Now I can't see someone write or type "cd" without a little bit of a cringe.
If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend z. It's impossible to Google for, but it's oh-so-convenient.
These are awesome. I didn't know about many of them. One tiny thing though, at the bottom it says > Recall that OS X apps are not true executables, but actually special directories (bundles) with the extension .app. open is the only way to launch these programs from the command line. Actually, you can launch them in other ways. Example /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --user-data-dir=/Us…
The open command does allow you to specify command-line arguments to pass to the application (via --args), which is generally a safer way to do things.
For example, I set the letter 'o' as an alias for 'open' on OS X, and to "thunar" on Xubuntu and "nemo" on Linux Mint.