Product Description

Beneath Mac OS X Tiger's easy-to-use Aqua interface lays a powerful Unix engine. Mac users know that Unix is at their fingertips, if only they knew how to access it. "Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger" provides Mac users with a user-friendly tour of the Unix world concealed beneath Mac OS X's hood and shows how to make the most use of the command-line tools. Thoroughly revised and updated for Mac OS X Tiger, this new edition introduces Mac users to the Terminal application and shows you how to navigate the command interface, explore hundreds of Unix applications that come with the Mac, and-most important-how to take advantage of both the Mac and Unix interfaces. Readers will learn how to: Launch and configure the Terminal application; Customize the shell environment; Manage files and directories; Search with Spotlight from the command line; Edit and create text files with vi and Pico; Perform remote logins; and Access Internet functions, and much more. "Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger" is a clear, concise introduction to what you need to know to learn the basics of Unix on Tiger. If you want to master the command-line, this gentle guide to using Unix on Mac OS X Tiger is well worth its cover price.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #145783 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 260 pages

From the Publisher
Thoroughly revised and updated for Mac OS X Tiger, this new edition introduces Mac users to the Terminal application and shows you how to navigate the command interface, explore hundreds of Unix applications that come with the Mac, and-most important-how to take advantage of both the Mac and Unix interfaces. If you want to master the command-line, this gentle guide to using Unix on Mac OS X Tiger is well worth its cover price.

About the Author
Dave Taylor is a popular writer, teacher and speaker of business and technology issues. The founder of The Internet Mall and iTrack.com, he's been involved with UNIX and the Internet since 1980, having created the popular Elm Mail System. He's also been a Mac fan since the year it was released. Once a Research Scientist at HP Laboratories and Senior Reviews Editor of SunWorld magazine, Taylor has contributed software to the official 4.4 release of Berkeley Unix (BSD). His programs are found in all versions of Linux and other popular Unix variants.

Excerpted from Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger by Dave Taylor. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 8 Taking Unix Online

A network lets computers communicate with each other, share files, send email, and much more. Unix systems have been networked for more than 25 years, and the Mac OS has had networking as an integral part of the system design from day one. In fact, AppleTalk was the first computer network that let computers connect directly together without needing a server in the middle.

This chapter introduces Unix networking: remotely accessing your Mac from other computers and copying files between computers. It also shows you how the Terminal’s "Connect to Server" feature can make common connections a breeze once you’ve set them up the first time.

Remote Logins

There may be times when you need to access your Mac, but you can’t get to the desk it’s sitting on. If you’re working on a different computer, you may not have the time or inclination to stop what you’re doing, walk over to your Mac, and log in (laziness may not be the only reason for this: perhaps someone else is using your Mac when you need to get on it, or perhaps your Mac is miles away). Mac OS X’s file sharing (System Preferences - Sharing - Services) lets you access your files, but there may be times you want to use the computer interactively, perhaps to move files around, search for a particular file, or perform a system maintenance task.

If you enable Remote Login (System Preferences - Sharing - Services), as shown in Figure 8-1, you can access your Mac’s Unix shell from any networked computer that can run the Secure Shell, SSH.

The ssh client program is included with Mac OS X (access it from within Terminal) and all Unix and Linux systems. And just in case you need to access your Mac from a Windows system, there are a number of different ssh applications available, including:

• SSH (ssh.com)
• OpenSSH (openssh.org)
• PuTTY (chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/)

Figure 8-2 shows how remote login programs such as ssh work. In a local login, you interact directly with the shell with the Terminal application. In a remote login, you run a remote-access program (such as SSH) on your local system, and that program lets you interact with a shell program on the remote system. When you enable Remote Login, the Sharing panel displays instructions for logging into your Mac from another computer. This message is shown in Figure 8-1 near the bottom:

To log in to this computer remotely, type "ssh taylor@192.168.1.101" at a shell command prompt.

To log into your Mac from a remote Unix system, use the command displayed in the Sharing panel, as shown in the following sample session. Here, a user on a Red Hat Linux system is connecting to a Mac OS X computer (the first time you connect, you’ll be asked to vouch for your Mac’s authenticity):

Red Hat: taylor $ ssh taylor@192.168.1.101
The authenticity of host '192.168.1.101 (192.168.1.101)' can't be
established.
RSA key fingerprint is 86:f6:96:f9:22:50:ea:4c:02:0c:58:a7:e4:a8:10:67.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added '192.168.1.101' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
taylor@192.168.1.101's password:
Last login: Thu Sep 25 10:27:58 2003
Welcome to Darwin!
$

If you have a firewall running, you need to open up a network port to allow remote connections. You can learn more about how to do this by starting with Apple’s Tiger Help system. In the Finder, use Command-? to launch Help Viewer, then search for "firewall".

To log into your Mac from a Windows machine using PuTTY, launch the PuTTY application, specify SSH (the default is to use the Telnet protocol described later), and type in your Mac OS X system’s IP address, as shown in the Mac’s Sharing panel. PuTTY prompts you for your Mac OS X username and password. Figure 8-3 shows a sample PuTTY session.

For the most part, being connected via ssh is identical to using the Terminal application itself. You can even use the open command (discussed in Chapter 7) to launch applications on the Macintosh system, which can surprise the heck out of anyone who might be watching the screen! Of course, you won’t be able to use the applications if you’re remote.

Using Apple Remote Desktop or Virtual Network Computing (VNC) software, you can use Mac applications remotely.If these look like they’ll meet your remote access needs, there’s a lot more information on remote application access in Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks (O’Reilly).

One of the very few differences is that the system records the Internet address of the system from which you’re connected remotely, as shown in this who output:

$ who
taylor console Jan 13 16:56
taylor ttyp1 Jan 13 17:00
taylor ttyp2 Jan 13 17:10 (192.168.1.100)

The third entry is a remote connection by a user on a different computer.

Customer Reviews

Very friendly book, appealing OS X UNIX introduction
OS X UNIX is amazingly friendly and accessible. Some people who had never used it before type commands and work with the operating system directly as a "cool guys" in movies! This book is very helpful and well written and it is serves as a very nice reference. I paired this book with that "UNIX Essentials" DVD(it sells on Amazon.com but they do not ship UK so I ordered it from Customflix directly) and it is complete UNIX course recorded and this book and a video they contribute one another greatly. The book is very particular about the subjects that related to OS X and because there are some differences between OS X and other UNIXes it is nice to have a book that deals with it. Overall it was very enjoyble and rewarding reading. I also enjoyed "OSX for UNIX geeks" book that sells here on Amazon as well, it is like a second part of a novell. Have a fun with OS X !

Gives you a good foundation
This book is one of the easiest to read computer books ive read. It gives you a good foundation on using UNIX which can be extended using online resources. Unlike the other reviewer i find the examples in this book easy to follow and useful. I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to understand more about their mac and UNIX.

THE book for learning about Unix within Mac OS X
Before reading this book, I had very little knowledge regarding the Unix side of my Mac but now I know how to wield the Terminal application with ease and confidence. It teaches you how to use the command line in a way that not only allows you to read through it like a step-by-step tutorial, but also in a way that allows you to jump about the book if you ever need to learn specific topics immediately. It's extremely detailed and informative, considering it is a book for total Unix beginners, and it also gives you information on how to continue learning about Unix as well as how to begin learning things such as shell scripts and programming languages, such as Perl, Python, Ruby, C and C++.

All in all, this is an amazing book that you will not regret purchasing. If you need somewhere to start learning about Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings, and how it can help you, look no further; you have found the perfect book.