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OS X Command Line Interface Tips - Customizing the Bash Shell

I've been working on a Mac for around four months now, and never really had much reason to open up Terminal and use the command line interface (CLI), other than for starting and stopping Tomcat. Now that I've started trying to learn about Git, I'm using the command line more and more, and finding out new stuff daily, so I'm going to write the occasional post to share some of this info.

About Bash

The operating system that most of us run on Macs is called OS X, and it's based on Unix. The way that one interacts with Unix is via a command shell, and the default shell for OS X is called Bash. It allows us to interact with our operating system without going through the graphical user interface (GUI) that sits on top of the OS. According to Wikipedia Bash stands for Bourne-again shell as it is a successor to the Bourne shell. So, when you open up Terminal, or iTerm which is an enhanced Terminal alternative, you are interacting with the Bash shell.

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Snow Leopard Eclipse Settings Gotcha

I just upgraded my MBP to Snow Leopard and I found that Eclipse would no longer start on my machine. It turns out that I had some custom settings in my eclipse.ini file, that I had picked up from a blog post by Marc Esher. Those settings did help speed up Eclipse, but one of them also prevented it from starting after the 10.6 upgrade.

I removed the offending option, -XX:+UseParallelOldGC, from my eclipse.ini file and now Eclipse is up and running again!

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