[Novalug] [OT] You all probably know that MACs are Unix machines

Bonnie Dalzell bdalzell@qis.net
Sat Dec 20 13:38:18 EST 2014


I apologize if this post is redundant to the general computer knowledge of 
most of you on this list but:

In case a few of you do not realize it, OSX Macs are basically a fancy GUI 
on top of a Unix OS.

Wikipedia has a neat graphic showing this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_timeline.en.svg

I have been doing a bit of reading on this because some people who might 
want to run my Perl scripts have MACs and it is much easier to run one of 
my scripts on a MAC than on a Windows machine since Perl should be already 
available from the command line of a MAC and teaching a typical windows 
user how to install Perl on a Windows machine can be a challenge.

When I did things on a MAC several years ago I had to use fetch and 
stuffit. Things have changed. The Mac Wikipedia article has a nice 
section on how software now can be added to a MAC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X#Updating_methods

In addition, for installing various command line programs to the Unix 
underpinnings there is now an "at-get" work-a-like for the MAC called 
Homebrew.

http://brew.sh/

So if any of your friends with MACS want to learn the usefulness of 
*nix command line applications, they do not need to go buy some 
computer to put Linux or FreeBSD on, all they need to do is open the 
shell and you can tutor them on the *nix command line.


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                        Bonnie Dalzell, MA
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