Conventions Used in This Book

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Used to indicate new terms, example URLs, filenames, file extensions, directories, commands and options, program names , and to highlight comments in examples. For example, a path in the filesystem appears as /Applications/Utilities .

Constant width

Used to show the contents of files or the output from commands. Also used to indicate code keywords, variables , values, parameters, and functions.

  Constant width bold  

Used in examples and tables to show commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user .

Constant width italic

Used in examples and tables to show text that should be replaced with user-supplied values.

Menus /navigation

Menus and their options are referred to in the text as File Open , Edit Copy, etc. Arrows are also used to signify a navigation path when using window options. For example, "System Preferences Desktop & Screen Saver Screen Saver means that you would launch System Preferences, click the icon for the "Desktop & Screen Saver" preference panel, and then select the "Screen Saver" pane within that panel.

Pathnames

Pathnames are used to show the location of a file or application in the filesystem. Directories (or folders, for Mac and Windows users) are separated by a forward slash. For example, if you see something like, "...launch the Terminal application ( /Applications/Utilities )" in the text, this means the Terminal application can be found in the Utilities subfolder of the Applications folder.

The tilde character ( ~ ) refers to the current user's Home folder, so ~/Library refers to the Library folder within your own Home folder.

A symbol at the end of a line of code denotes an unnatural line break; that is, you should not enter these as two lines of code, but as one continuous line. Multiple lines are used in these cases due to printing constraints.

$ , #

The dollar sign ( $ ) is used in some examples to show the user prompt for the bash shell; the hash mark ( # ) is the prompt for the root user.

Menu symbols

When looking at the menus for any application, you will see some symbols associated with keyboard shortcuts for a particular command. For example, to open a document in Microsoft Word, you can go to the File menu and select Open (File Open), or you can issue the keyboard shortcut, -O.

Figure P-1 shows the symbols used in the various menus to denote a keyboard shortcut.

Figure P-1. Keyboard modifiers for issuing commands

Rarely will you see the Control symbol used as a menu command option; it's more often used in association with mouse clicks or for working with the bash shell.

Indicates a tip, suggestion, or general note.

Indicates a warning or caution.