Mac question

[blair]

Just curious and too lazy to do a google search. Mac is based on Unix, right? Does that mean that it has the standard Posix shell commands like grep, awk, sed, cut, paste, ed, ex, vi, wc, etc... Maybe Moki can answer this one. Oh, does it have Emacs too? I mainly ask because I run Cygwin on my laptop to handle these things when I don't feel like firing up the desktop - and as my laptop is getting older I should start considering a new once. Maybe one of those sporty Mac laptops would be fun for the next few years. I've never used a Mac before (practically never seen one), but it could be a pretty powerful tool for me if it could handle my Unix needs.

blair

 

[moki]

Just curious and too lazy to do a google search. Mac is based on Unix, right? Does that mean that it has the standard Posix shell commands like grep, awk, sed, cut, paste, ed, ex, vi, wc, etc... Maybe Moki can answer this one. Oh, does it have Emacs too? I mainly ask because I run Cygwin on my laptop to handle these things when I don't feel like firing up the desktop - and as my laptop is getting older I should start considering a new once. Maybe one of those sporty Mac laptops would be fun for the next few years. I've never used a Mac before (practically never seen one), but it could be a pretty powerful tool for me if it could handle my Unix needs.

blair

[snapback]173240[/snapback]​

Yes to all of the above. There's an application called "Terminal" which you can use to access any of these Unix tools -- comes with gcc too, so you can compile anything you want really. On my laptop:

[cabron:~] andrew% which emacs
/usr/bin/emacs
[cabron:~] andrew% which vi
/usr/bin/vi
[cabron:~] andrew% which grep
/usr/bin/grep
[cabron:~] andrew% which awk
/usr/bin/awk

You get the idea... this is just the plain-jane standard install of OS X 10.3.8. It's a full-on BSD subsystem, not just a few tools here and there. The only difference at all is some things (.conf files, tools, etc.) may be in different directories than you're used to -- but that's the same with any Unix OS.

It's not a limited Unix emulation layer, or a few tools scattered here and there -- it *is* Unix (BSD to be exact). It also comes with a built-in XTerm as well, should you desire that.

 

[blair]

Thanks for the info :thumbs: