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
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