43 Folders

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”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Calling all Terminal nerds

CLI nerds and UNIX ex-pats, I have a humble but profound request: help us GUI laggards learn more about getting started in the OS X Terminal. We all secretly know that’s where all your good junk is hidden, but it can be pretty daunting to the uninitiated user.

I propose that when you command-line wizards happen upon a web resource that might be useful to someone new to the Terminal, you should post it to del.icio.us with the tag “OSXCLI” (I’m pronouncing it “AHSS-klee”). And please do comment in your link: why is this good and who will it benefit? Here’s the RSS feed for the rest of us.

Alternately, you can post a link in comments here, but I think the collaborative, RSS-able option, as ever, is more fun, don’t you? Now get linking, beard guy.

Ron Fondo's picture

The say that half of...

The say that half of knowledge is knowing where to find it.

One of my all-time favorite cli tools is apropos. So for instance, if you can't remember (or simply don't know) what shell commands you have at your disposal for converting a PostScript file to a PDF, just type "apropos postscript" for a list of shell commands/libraries/resources related to dealing with PostScript® files. (OK,OK; maybe it only returns results that have man pages containing these strings, but you get the idea).

This is a great way for the uninitiated to identify a shell command for a specific task. Great for us AppleScript Studio guys.
 
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