Mac users are accustomed to ease of use. However, an increasing number of users are converting from Linux and other POSIXes to OS X.

Getting Started

Applications->Utilities->Terminal is by far the most important application for the Linux convert. It's basically a vt100 emulator. The familiar commands are all there, though color ls isn't included. [future link to binary here]. You'll have to download it.

For those new to the command line:

For those that are new to the CLI (command line interface), welcome. There is a fairly steep initial learning curve, but you'll get the hang of it. Some basic technology is in order. When you start Terminal, you will see an ugly text thingy with a cursor next to it. The ugly text is called a prompt, and your whole experience is based on it. You can change the prompt to any text you like, and the system is even smart enough that it can tell you who you are and what directory (folder) you're in. The prompt is presented to you by a program called a shell. You'll want to know which shell you are running, so take a moment to type ps and hit Enter (Return, whatever). You'll see output similar to the following:

  PID  TT  STAT      TIME COMMAND
  574 std  S      0:00.03 -tcsh (tcsh)

Changing your shell

Unfortunately for many bash users, the default shell on OS X is tcsh. Changing your shell is not as simple as it is under other POSIX systems; chsh doesn't work. To change this situation, you can either enter an niutil command with lots of switches or use the NetInfo utility. If your copy of OS X predates Jaguar, you'll have to download bash [future link].

ssh

ssh is a really handy utility. It's much better than old-fashioned telnet for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it's encrypted. ssh also allows for Xforwarding, or viewing a remotely running application locally. This is really handy if you want to work with MATLAB on your EWS account and it's three in the morning. Just ssh in to an EWS machine from and X terminal and run matlab. It'll be slow, especially if you're not in URH or another high speed link, but it'll get the job done.

ssh has a number of options that you can set either from the command line or from config files. The settings that apply only to your account are in ~/.ssh/config. Because ssh only requires a hostname if your local username matches the remote hostname, you could set the User variable to your NetID and then you would only have to type the hostname. You can also set up shortcuts to hostnames with the Host and Hostname settings. Set Host to the shortcut and HostName to the real name. You can have as many pairs of these as you want, and also specify different usernames and other settings for each host.

ftp