OS X Command Line Utilities

Post by micampe » Thu, May 15, 2014, 4:52 PM UTC

veidr wrote: post #86

_jsn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although this technically works, in some cases it may lead to strange bits of misbehavior. (Depending on where you do it, the app may end up in the wrong audit session or mach namespace, and it may also be missing some environment variables that it was expecting). 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.

But the open command doesn't allow you to pass the environment, and Apple seems hellbent on breaking every workaround they've implemented over the years (e.g. ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist). So, doing Foo.app/Contents/MacOS/Foo is often the only way to launch a GUI app while inheriting the full environment that you have on the command line. I often have to do this to launch various developer tools, and have them be abl…

    Opened applications inherit environment variables just
    as if you had launched the application directly through
    its full path.  This behavior was also present in Tiger.

Post by Monkeyget » Thu, May 15, 2014, 5:06 PM UTC

sum_guy_juno wrote: post #122

Monkeyget wrote: post #54

This was supposed to be few lines of remarks. It expanded quickly in relation with my enthusiasm for this topic. I've been investing some time in the command line on my Mac. I am moving from a dilettante going to the shell on a per-need basis to a more seasoned terminal native. It pays off handesomely! It's hard to convey how nice it to have to have a keyboard-based unified environment instead of a series of disjoine…

I noticed your main editor is emacs? I consider myself a Terminal Native as well, but why dont you like using GUI Emacs and Eshell/m-x Shell instead?

Post by Demiurge » Thu, May 15, 2014, 5:22 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #102

archagon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that macports is a lot more finicky and hacky, especially when it comes to built-in dependencies. homebrew is specifically designed to avoid such problems.

My understanding is quite the opposite. There are a number of trivial differences between MacPorts and Homebrew - for example, MacPorts recipes are written in Tcl, Homebrew's are written in Ruby, MacPorts puts things in /opt/local, Homebrew puts things in /usr/local/Cellar, MacPorts gets its metadata with rsync, Homebrew uses Git. But there is, as far as i know, only one non-trivial difference: MacPorts links everyth…

Post by jdkenney » Thu, May 15, 2014, 5:28 PM UTC

ggreer wrote: post #28

eschaton wrote: post #11

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.

Many people love them, but I never got the hang of pushd and popd. These days, I use a CDPATH and z[1]. I also use zsh, which supports handy little things such as cd - (cd to previous directory). If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend z. It's impossible to Google for, but it's oh-so-convenient. 1. https://github.com/rupa/z

Post by reledi » Thu, May 15, 2014, 5:35 PM UTC

wink wrote: post #93

'open' is on of the things I long for most as a Linux user. There are several ways to achieve something that are all inferior or downright broken. Usually you don't have a huge problem, until you have. xdg-open for example could've solved this, if it was universally working. I wrote related rant once[0] when I tried to debug an issue of a misconfigured default browser. [0]: http://f5n.org/blog/2013/default-browser-li…