What is the equivalent of Windows system files?

Hi,

I have just started using a mac, and am trying to figure out a bit about what makes it 'tick'.

What is the equivalent on a mac of the windows system directory?
What is the equivalent of the registry?

Sorry if the q's are obvious, but i'm just inquisitive - liking to understand a bit about the kit which I use.

Thanks
Dave

droseman said:

What is the equivalent on a mac of the windows system directory?
What is the equivalent of the registry?

Click to expand...

There aren't any.
If you really want to understand the inner workings of OS X, then the first thing you should do is to stop comparing it to and looking for parallels with Windows.

O'Reilly Publishing does have some good books about OS X on a more intermediate level. I would suggest taking a look at a few of those for some more in-depth analysis and information on OS X.

I'll get tutted at and corrected for this, but fundamentally OSX is based around an OS called Unix, which is a very different beast to Windows, and in fact much older.

A lot of what you see is a graphical user interface that sits over Unix. You can do a lot of tweaking via this GUI, but you'll eventually have to face the horror that is 'terminal'. There be dragons in terminal. Arrrr.

droseman said:

Hi,

I have just started using a mac, and am trying to figure out a bit about what makes it 'tick'.

What is the equivalent on a mac of the windows system directory?
What is the equivalent of the registry?

Sorry if the q's are obvious, but i'm just inquisitive - liking to understand a bit about the kit which I use.

Thanks
Dave

Click to expand...

The equivalent of the registry is .plist files.

Like most *nix based OSs OS X applications store their settings in plain text files in various places. The convention is that system wide applications store global settings in a central Library location and user based settings in local user Library locations.

Some badly behaved apps will scatter the things all over the place but that is rare.

Go to spotlight and type *.plist in the search box, you will have thousands of hits.

The .plist files on OS X are usually in XML format where the settings are stored along with a name, this is useful if you have to re-install licensed applications because you can locate the .plist files which have the name of the application in the title and inside find a line like ...

<license_key> some-long-random-looking-string

The "system" files are generally hidden from you but they are there if you do dig deep enough. Changing them in any way a very silly thing to do unless you really, really know what you are doing.

(for example there are root owned hidden files that define what values to use to drive the hardware, changing them may actually damage the monitor)

Like Linux when OS X is started up it runs though a long list of sanity checks and will generally sort out simple problems (like when you have inadvertantly deleted an important configuration file it will generate a "safe" default one to replace it) for you.

If you download and install Onyx you can have fun exploring a lot of the system stuff from a menu driven application.

Have fun.

Amen-Moses

thank you for all your replies. That makes a lot more sense to me.

jonnyd - Thanks for that, I will probably end up thre anyway, thats what happened when I used Linux, even though they are a lot more gui oriented now... i'm not afraid of the terminal, I have my dragon slaying sword

cheers
Dave

droseman said:

thank you for all your replies. That makes a lot more sense to me.

jonnyd - Thanks for that, I will probably end up thre anyway, thats what happened when I used Linux, even though they are a lot more gui oriented now... i'm not afraid of the terminal, I have my dragon slaying sword

cheers
Dave

Click to expand...

Good for you droseman. You will find that unlike Linux/Unix, which treat the command line as an almost equal interface to the GUI, Mac OS X is pretty GUI centered. You shouldn't NEED Terminal.app much, but it is fun to play around in.