Are the Terminal commands used in Mac OS 10.1.3 the same as those found on a real Unix system? if they are, what book would you recommend as a terminal refferance guide?
I already have 'The Missing Manual' by O'Reilly, but there ain't much in terms of managing the system via the terminal
MAX OS X is a real UNIX system like every other of the myriad generic flavors of UNIX in the market, including LINUX systems.
In all flavors of UNIX/LINUX there are numerous variations of command line utilities and maturity of different software ports.
It is safe to say that MAC OS X is growing very fast, but does not have as many command line utilities (Yet!) as older UNIX systems. After all, MAC OS X is barely a year old!!!
If you're using the "bash" shell (as I understand, bash isn't on an OS X system by default, you have to install it), you can get a fairly complete list by typing the tab key twice on a line all by itself.
For example, on a linux system, I did this:
$ [tab][tab]
Display all 2246 possibilities? (y or n)
If I typed "y", it would very quickly scroll a list of possible commands - I don't know of a way to capture it though, unless you used a telnet or ssh client that would log your connection...
It will help you install and use hundreds of UNIX programs, more and more are added everyday. You can install the 'bash' shell if you like (MacOSX ships with 'tcsh' by defaut). There is a good bash manual http://www.linuxdoc.org on the 'Guides' section.
You can also check out various GUI UNIX frontends for MacOSX at http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx
Check out 'OpenMan' wich is a good manual page ('man page') frontend for MacOSX, very useful to learn CLI commands.
MacOSX is a year old but as you know it is NeXTSTEP based which is fairly old in itself (not mentioning its FreeBSD roots). There are so many commands and utilites that it's easy to get lost... Just installing 'cpan' opens a vast perl universe.
here is a nice way to list all commands available to you.
% ls `echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g'` | more
NB: those are back-quotes enclosing front-quotes. you might be best served by just cutting and pasting this to your terminal.
this will list all commands available to you at your terminal, one screen at a time. this is not really a good way to begin using and understanding UNIX, because there will probably be lots of commands (100?), and you won t learn too much from just seeing them. most of them will have esoteric names that you won t understand. but you asked for it and here it is.
if you see a command that looks interesting, type:
% man commandname
to learn more
understanding how this command works will go a long way towards teaching you about how to use UNIX. here we have most basic UNIX concepts: piping, shell variables, regexpressions with sed, command substitution and basic file commands like ls, echo, and more.
If all you are looking for is a good start up book for OS X Unix then try www.ora.com and search OS X. Learning Unix for Mac OS X looks like a good title, but I haven't touched a copy yet.
As far as I know the apache webserver run the same runs the same on all "unix type" platforms. You might find a refferance on the Apache site, www.apache.org