FreeMacUnix.com

Want Color in Your Text Editor?

Chad Sweely — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:18:59 +0000

If you are a programmer or a web designer, and want to have color designation to your coding without having to buy Dreamweaver or any other pricey HTML editors, I would recommend downloading Vim. Vim is a vi-based clone that allows you to view your code, HTML, CSS, etc. in a color-coded style.

This app can be downloaded by doing: sudo apt-get install vim

VIM can also be an alternative to using vi, which only displays code in monochrome. Here is a comparison of between the physical appearances of vi and vim:

Terminal without vim - Just using vi

Terminal with vim

This also helps troubleshooting easier if you have an error somewhere in your HTML code. This color coding works for: HTML, XML, CSS, PHP, Perl, HtAccess, and many other languages.

Enjoy!

Play Tetris in Emacs

Chad Sweely — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:39:27 +0000

If you’re ever using Emacs (Extensible Macro System) as an editor and feeling bored, you can always play Tetris in it. Playing Tetris in Emacs only works in the GNU environment which Mac OS X also runs under. The steps for running Tetris in Emacs have been provided below:

In Terminal, type emacs at the comment. Emacs will then appear for you.
In the Emacs window, press . This will bring you to the note buffer section (shown below).

Once you are in the buffer section, press x, type in tetris, and then hit Enter.
Tetris will then appear for you (shown below).

To move your pieces around in Tetris, use your right/left arrow keys in the direction you want the piece to move. Your up/down arrow keys will change the position of the piece, and your space bar will shoot the piece down the bottom.

This is a fun and interesting Easter Egg included in this classic editor!

Make the most of the Mac OS X’s command line

admin — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:14:47 +0000

If you’re like most Mac users, the UNIX command line is the red-headed stepchild of the operating system. It’s always there, but you’re not going to acknowledge its existence — that is, until you need to run an SQL query, make an rsync backup, or generally muck about in the system internals.

Thankfully, TheAppleBlog’s Andrew Bednarz has assembled a compendium of Mac OS X terminal tips, tweaks, and tricks. He shows how to use Visor, a cool program that provides an always-accessible pulldown terminal prompt just like the console in the video game Quake. He also shares some insider UNIX knowledge on tweaking Terminal.app to display color-coded directory listings and more informative command prompts.

Go check out his list of tips. Your command line will thank you.

Having trouble finding text with grep? Try grepping with color

Chad Sweely — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:47:46 +0000

Having trouble finding a needle in a haystack? You can always use grep --color to find what you are looking for. This method is best used for finding a specific piece of text in a document that is all on one line, or a unique string of text within a repetitious document. I have provided the syntax for this grep option below:

grep --color "text" filename

Example:

LSPCI and LSUSB

Chad Sweely — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:42:15 +0000

The commands listed in this post are more for Linux than Unix. To find out information about the hardware of your computer, you can run an lspci command. Lspci will output the specifications of your hardware in a list style arrangement as shown below:

If you want to get more specific in your lspci output (e.g. wanting just to display a certain brand), you can always do lspci | grep -i "Productname" which will only return results that includes the string from your grep command. For example, if I wanted to find all of the hardware made by Broadcom, I would do lspci | grep -i "broadcom" and the results would return only hardware that mentions Broadcom.

Although, this will only display hardware that is inside your computer, it will not display any hardware that is attached by USB. This is where the command lsusb comes in. Lsusb will list all of the USB ports you have in your computer and display any hardware specifications that are plugged-in to them as shown in the example below:

Need to find a SMALL amount of text in a BIG directory? No problem!

Chad Sweely — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:49:51 +0000

Have you ever tried to grep in a directory that has a vast amount of files and you received an error like this? (below)

If so, there is a simple way around this. Just use this: find . | xargs grep "yahoo" * | more. I will break down these processes for you:

find . - Find is a command that outputs the location of a file. In this case by specifying a ., the search will only be done in the present directory.
xargs - This allows a command to be executed from standard input. This also helps force the grep command (coming next) to return output, even when the directory is too large.
grep - The way we will be using this command is to search through a file for a specific string. If you are looking for straight text, it is best to use quotes (e.g. “text”) to help the command line decipher exactly what you are looking for. More info on grep can be found on this earlier post.
more - This command is optional for this process. More would be best used if you were expecting a full page of output returned from your search, and want to be prompted for the next page. This option would be very beneficial if the string you are searching for would be common in your results.

Apropos

Chad Sweely — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:35:13 +0000

Ever wanted to use a command to do something, but couldn’t quite figure out the actual command to accomplish what you need done? Try using apropos! Apropos is a way to browse through the help area of the Unix/Linux operating system for a command that will help achieve your goal. For example, if I wanted to find commands that relate to “secure”, I would enter apropos secure at the command line, and the kernel would return the results listed below along with any services that involve ’secure’:

As always, if you wanted to get a more elaborate description on a command or service, you can always use man (shortened for: manual). This will display a full description, and various options of a command which you have found using apropos.

Alias

admin — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:02:35 +0000

The alias command is very useful. It is kind of a shortcut in some ways. I get tired of tying ls -la so I can see all the info for my files so what i do is type alias ls 'ls -la'. What this command does is that it sets up an alias so that every time I type ls the computer treats is as though I typed ls -la. There are many other things you can do also. Say you have a long command you run a lot. You can alias it to something like mc.

Ex: alias mc 'locate log_error | grep -R 192.168.1.1 *'

Your command can be as long or as short that you want to alias. I also use it to setup ssh connections.

Ex: alias con1 'ssh usrname@192.168.1.1'

Now any time I type con1 it will try to make an ssh connection to that ip address.

The diff command

admin — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:13:47 +0000

The diff command is a very useful command to see the differences between two files. An example of this command would be

diff file1.txt file2.txt

It takes file2.txt and compares it to file1.txt and displays the differences that are in file2.txt. You may also want to use the -b options in the command because that will allow it to ignore differences in white space. This command is very useful in programming when you have a backup version of a script that you just modified. If the script no longer works it can help you track down bugs, by looking at backup version of the script that does work.

The kill command

admin — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:16:47 +0000

Today we are going to look at a command that you don’t use very much in a Unix environment. The kill command. It is used when an application is stuck or not responding. The basic form of the command is kill [option]… PID. The PID is the process ID, you can get it by using the top command that I talked about previously. The most common option for the kill command is the -9 option. It will kill the process immediately.

Example

kill -9 2342

If you type top again you should see that the process that was associated with that PID is no longer running.