Unix Command Line books

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Does anyone know of any good step by step guides as to how to learn Mac OS X Terminal and the Unix command line stuff? I would prefer books and not websites by the way.

thanks for any help in advance.
 

cwa107


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Does anyone know of any good step by step guides as to how to learn Mac OS X Terminal and the Unix command line stuff? I would prefer books and not websites by the way.

thanks for any help in advance.

I like O'Reilly's Running Mac OS X Tiger. Although it's not specifically focused at the command line, it does cover quite a bit and is geared toward "power users".
 
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This is also a fabulous book, Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach by Amit Singh.

It has a broader look on the Macintosh and its operating system, the Unix base, etc. but I know there is some command line stuff in there as well.

I hope to be able to buy it soon. :)
 
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Personally my view is that if you really want to learn the Unix commandline, you would do better to run Linux on a PC and do everything from the commandline. If you don't know how to do something, look it up and figure out how to do it. This takes lots of work and requires considerable stamina, but you'll learn it. Ideally you want to think in Unix. (Okay, I'm weird.)

It's sort of an immersion technique, but it's how I learned Unix. In six months, I went from thinking I knew something about Unix (which I didn't) to rolling my own working custom kernel. In the Linux world, you have lots of books to support you. Taking cwa's advice one step further, O'Reilly books on Linux and Unix are generally excellent.

The OS X commandline environment is somewhat limited imho. Frankly, the benefit of Unix to the typical Mac user is stability, not the full development environment. There *are* times I've used vi on my Mac, but that's because I've used it alot in Linux to know how it can be helpful here. Ha! I just used sed yesterday to edit a file, and it worked like a champ.
 
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THE best book I have read on the topic of the bash command line is:

A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming

by Mark Sobell. It is only about two years old, so you should be able to find it easily at Amazon or at a brick n mortar book store.

AND... as an added bonus, if you don't like it, it is so thick and heavy that it can double as a Christmas fruitcake! :D :D ...sorry, couldn't resist taking a jab at fruitcakes while discussing such a large book!
 

rman


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When I look for books I look at the O'Reilly series.
 
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Mac's shell actually is pretty powerful- just like FreeBSD's.
 
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Personally my view is that if you really want to learn the Unix commandline, you would do better to run Linux on a PC and do everything from the commandline. If you don't know how to do something, look it up and figure out how to do it. This takes lots of work and requires considerable stamina, but you'll learn it. Ideally you want to think in Unix. (Okay, I'm weird.)

It's sort of an immersion technique, but it's how I learned Unix. In six months, I went from thinking I knew something about Unix (which I didn't) to rolling my own working custom kernel. In the Linux world, you have lots of books to support you. Taking cwa's advice one step further, O'Reilly books on Linux and Unix are generally excellent.

The OS X commandline environment is somewhat limited imho. Frankly, the benefit of Unix to the typical Mac user is stability, not the full development environment. There *are* times I've used vi on my Mac, but that's because I've used it alot in Linux to know how it can be helpful here. Ha! I just used sed yesterday to edit a file, and it worked like a champ.

I agree with you completely. You wont learn it until you are immersed into it fully. I came from Linux, and I learned the command line first with Linux. Doing so puts you years ahead of people who only work with GUI's.

It really depends on how far you want to go with it I guess. A good book that I used, but would probably be backwards for you, is Mac OS X for Unix Geeks.
 

rman


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I agree with the two of you. I guess I am old school. I learned hp-ux, Irix, AIX, Sun OS and Solaris. I have not touch Linux yet. There was no windowing environment, when I learned. X windows came later.
 
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