Here is a shell script that will open applications from the terminal without having to type out the full path to the application. It assumes that your applications are kept in /Applications. Using this script and an alias, you can type something like "o TextEdit" to open TextEdit, or "o TextEdit ~/Documents/some_file" to open some_file in TextEdit.

If you'd like to see the script, read the rest of the article.

Hey! You just crave to install a CVS server on a MacOS X computer so several people can work on the same project or to have a single repository for your sources on your network? Don't worry, this is very simple, as long as you have installed the Developer Tools.

If you'd like to do get a CVS server running, read the rest of this article.

[Editor's note: I have not tried this myself, and there may very well be a typo or two I made in posting this article ... if something doesn't work, please let me know what needs to be fixed!]

[Editor's note: This one is way beyond my ability to test, as the only UNIX box in my house is OS X! Nonetheless, if it helps someone out there, that's why we're here. Use at your own risk, of course!]

OS X 10.1 now uses the 'o' command option in control files of a print job. The version of lpd in NeXTSTEP and other UNIX systems probably doesn't understand this 'new' option. I found a simple solution for that problem. You can batch the LPRIOMHelper. The file is located here:

/System/Library/Printers/IOMs/LPRIOM.plugin/Contents/MacOS/LPRIOMHelper

Use a hex editor to replace 0x6F with 0x6C ('o' -> 'l') at position 0x1A03 (6659 Dez). You need root permissions to do that. And check for the right file attributes after editing the file:

-rwsr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  18984 Oct 21 20:31 LPRIOMHelper

The UNIX commands to set the owner and file attributes for LPRIOMHelper are:

chown root.wheel LPRIOMHelper
chmod a+x LPRIOMHelper
chmod u+s LPRIOMHelper

OS X's file structure mounts all partitions under the "/Volumes" directory at the root level of the filesystem. However, when navigating the filesystem with "cd" and other commands, it can be annoying to type "/Volumes/volume_name" each time you want to access a different partition. To learn about symbolic links and use them to add shortcuts at the root level of your filesystem, read the rest of this article. This assumes you are moderately comfortable in the Terminal, and that you have administrative privileges.

Here is a step by step guide to installing the industrial-strength FTP server ProFTPd on Mac OS X. It assumes that you have the Developers Tools installed on your system and that you have an Internet connection. The installation will replace the existing OS X FTP server with ProFTPd.

If you'd like to get ProFTPd running on your OS X installation, read the rest of this article.

Stuffit Deluxe is a great tool for most archiving duties, but not too good if you have a large number of individual file archives to create. I had this problem with uploading quiz results to individual students. To save space, I needed to ZIP each of 23 files and to do that with a GUI is pretty clumsy. However, I discovered that two CLI tools, zip and unzip, can make this job much easier.

unzip works just like you'd expect:

  unzip [zipfilename]

zip, on the other hand, took a little figuring out:

   zip -h                              {...dumps online help listing}
  zip [zipfilename] [file to zip]     {...zips and retains the original file}
  zip -m [zipfilename] [file to zip]  {...zips and removes the original file}

Best of all, I created a script called smush to help me out even more.

# smush - a quick and dirty script to zip pdfs

for i in *.pdf
do
   echo "zipping ${i}"
   zip -m $i.zip $i
done

I cd to the directory, type smush and it all works automagically. Sweet!

[Editor's note: You'll need to enter the above lines into a terminal editor such as pico, save the file, make it executable (chmod 755 filename), and then make sure it's on your path to use the script.]

OS X includes the standard UNIX 'sendmail' program, which can be configured to send and receive mail from the internet. Effectively, this means you can have an unlimited number of email accounts for yourself and family members. Setting up sendmail, however, can be quite tricky - especially if you want it to both send and receive internet mail.

There have been a number of tips posted here on dealing with this issue (try searching on 'sendmail'), but today's Mac Resource Page has the best start-to-finish description of the process that I've seen yet. The MRP covers getting a domain name, configuring sendmailsetting up users, and getting a POP server running to handle the routing of the mail.

If you have a full-time Internet connection and want to handle your own mail, give Eric's MRP a visit today! After today, you'll have to search for the October 30th posting to find the details.

In the "Open this folder in the Terminal" hint, there was a little exchange about how to do the opposite - how do you open the current Terminal path as a folder in the Finder?

Marc responded with the answer (as a comment) before I could get this new tip published, but I felt it was worth a separate entry to make finding it easier in the future.

To open whatever Terminal path you are currently traversing in the Finder, simply type:

open .

and a new Finder window will open up with the directory's contents -- notice the "." at the end; if you leave it out, nothing will happen. Marc also mentioned a couple of other "GUI/Terminal" integration tools - pbcopy and pbpaste, which duplicate copy and paste in the Finder.

In case some of you didn't know, OSX users have access to the latest and greatest in MP3 encoding software - LAME ... absolutely free! Just download the latest version from CVS or simply get the latest daily release. After downloading, just decompress the archive, switch to the terminal and change to the directory of the source, type "su" to become root, then do:

./configure
make
make install

Then type 'rehash' or restart the term and that's all! For help using LAME, use the command lame --longhelp. For very high quality mp3s (see www.r3mix.net), use the command:

lame --r3mix -q0 --id3v2-only --tt "[insert title here]" --ta "[insert artist here]"[space]
"/Volumes/Audio CD/Track [XX].aiff" "/Users/[username]/Desktop/[outputfilenamehere].mp3"

Replace [space] with an actual space character and enter the command on one line; make the appropriate substitutions for track title and artist, the track number (replace [XX] with the actual number), your username, and the output file name.

[Editor's note: A previous hint explained how to download a precompiled version of LAME; the above instructions will create a much newer version. You'll need the Developer Tools installed to build LAME.]

Check out OroborOSX. It is an X Window System (also known as X11) window manager that integrates X11 very nicely with OSX.

To quote from that web page, "The aim of OroborOSX is to make X11 windows look, and ultimately behave, as closely as possible to 'native' OS X windows." It's a very small application that's easy to install. It requires XDarwin and XFree86.

I'm using the latest version, 0.75 alpha 2 and am enjoying it much more than any other X window manager that I've tried. Take a look.