If you leave your OSX box up and running 24/7 and have been burning some midnight oil, you might have noticed some system activity in the early hours. If you look in /etc/crontab, you'll see that the root user runs some nightly, weekly and monthly security and maintenance tasks. Whenever cron produces output, it gets emailed to the job owner, so in this case root will be sent email nightly, weekly and monthly.
Unless you're in the habit of logging in as root and reading the email there it's more useful to have all of root's email redirected to your own mailbox. As with most (all?) unix systems, you can do this by creating a .forward file for the root user. Read the rest of this article if you'd like instructions on how to create this file.
I'm trying to get jed running so I have to install slang first. I finally got onto ADC and get the dev kit. The configure script dies at host type. What is host type? darwin? ppc? rhapsody? How can I get a list of acceptable host types?
Bordering on a dumb question I know, just can't find answer for this.
This past weekend, I took advantage of OS X's UNIX core to automate the database backup for this site. Until recently, I backed up the data by connecting to the ISP, launching the mySQL database program, exporting the data, then using one of a number of transfer programs (Fetch, RBrowser, etc) to bring the file back to my home machine.
Although this worked, it was quite tedious, and I would often forget to do the backup. Then another geeklog-powered site had a major disaster, and lost all of their articles (macosxapps.com, if you'd like to stop by and help them rebuild, it'd be greatly appreciated!). This was the kick I needed to find a better way to do my backups.
Read the rest of this article if you'd like a little insight into how I used some basic UNIX programs to handle this repetitive mundane task. This is fairly basic stuff for UNIX wizards, and I'm sure I could be doing this in a more advanced way, but it does demonstrate how the UNIX core of OS X can be put to good use.
I installed Samba a while back to play with it, but I've since moved my OS X box to a non-Windows environment. I want to uninstall Samba just for general "system purity," but I can't find any uninstall directions. Any clues?
A while ago someone asked about how to configure osx for printing from the command line.
If you have a postscript printer in your network, this is actually pretty simple. Create a printcap file (named "myprintcap" for example) with jEdit, or vi or emacs or any other text editor:
lp:\ :lp=:rm=<printer ip or name>:rp=lp:\ :sd=/var/spool/lpd/lp:ty=PostScript:
Save this file somehere in your directory. Note: there should be backslashes terminating the first two lines. They were consumed by the scripts processing this hint, I guess. [Editor's note: Backslashes get stripped out, unless you enter in HTML mode, and use the character code '\' for a backslash ... I've added them to the above lines.
Next you load this printcap into netinfo (line 1 below) and create the spool directory (line 2). Open a terminal and connect as root ("su"), then type:
If you're a complete beginner to UNIX (as I still consider myself), you can use something called aliases to save yourself a lot of typing at the command line.
In the Mac OS, an alias is simply a pointer to another file. In the UNIX world, an alias is similar in concept, except that it's a command that points at another command. There are a few pre-defined aliases in the tcsh shell (the program that runs when you open a terminal). You can see these by typing
alias
at the command line. One of the more useful pre-defined aliases is ll which replaces ls -lag for complete file listings.
Although the pre-defined aliases are useful, the real power is in creating your own aliases for your often-used commands. If you're new to UNIX and you'd like to learn about aliases and how to use them, read the rest of this article.
I just wanted to let everyone know that I have successfully built Apache 1.3.17 and PHP 4.04pl1 as a DSO on Mac OS X Public Beta 1H39 (AKA Darwin).
The problem was that the configure script for PHP was trying to create a file in the ./pear directory named 'pear' where a directory named 'PEAR' already exists. Of course, since Mac OS X uses the HFS+ disk format by default (case preserving, case insensitive) this is not allowed. Read the rest of the article if you'd like to see how to modify the configure file to successfully build the latest versions of PHP and Apache.
Michael.
[Editor's note: This process requires the developer's tools, as you'll need the compiler to build the applications after editing the files.]
If you often transfer the same file to/from an FTP server (or do anything repetitively with an FTP server), you can use UNIX and a simple script to automate the process. Although similar things are probably possible with grapical clients, this will teach you a bit about UNIX and a very basic shell script.
I use two such scripts on my OS X box. Since my home machine is occasinally out of OS X, that means that my family's OS X hosted website is not accessible. Before I shut down OS X, I upload a "Our server is down" page to my ISP-hosted site. When I return to OS X, I upload a "Our server is up" page. This way, our family and friends can tell easily if the site is up or not. I manage both these tasks with a double-click on an icon in the finder, thanks to these scripts.
This tutorial requires some basic understanding of the command line and an OS X text editor such as vi or pico. Read the rest if you'd like to see how to set up a simple automated FTP script.
The default shell (the program that runs when you open a terminal window) is called tcsh. Bash is an alternative with a superset of features that many UNIX users prefer; you can read about it on the Bash information page. Jim Weisbin of savagetranscendental.com has written a great set of instructions for installing the Bash shell in OS X.
You can download Bash from Jim's site, and the installation instructions are included. It's quite simple; if you've used the terminal much at all, it should be fairly straightforward. You can also view the instructions online prior to downloading to get some idea of the process.
