Understanding Tiger, HFS, and BSD Command Interaction

Chapter 10. Common Unix Shell Commands: File, Directory, and Disk Operations

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding Tiger, HFS+, and BSD Command Interaction

• Basic Tiger Filesystem Navigation

• Managing Files and Directories

• Examining File Contents

• Searching for Files, Directories, and More

• File Compression and Archiving

• Getting Disk and Directory Information: du, df

• Mounting/Unmounting Volumes: diskutil

A large fraction of the truly good uses for a command-line application revolve around manipulating files in some fashion. It's immediately obvious that a command-line based painting program sounds like a rather cumbersome tool (although we will talk about a command-line photo-editing suite in Chapters 13, "Using Common Command-Line Applications and Application Suites," and 14, "Command-Line Software Installation and Troubleshooting"), but a point-and-click based file renaming system, such as is used by the Finder, is a similarly less-than-optimal solution. The command line provides better ways to perform this type of action, so we will begin our in-depth coverage of the command line with the simple file-manipulation commands that are ubiquitously necessary to get almost anything done. You'll almost certainly find that you use the commands from this chapter more frequently than any other, when working at the command line. Augmented with the material from Chapter 15, "Shell Configuration and Programming (Shell Scripting)," you might find that there is little else that you want or need to do at the command line. This could easily be enough to save you hours of mousing or driving a trackpad every day.