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Mac Command Line Interface Tips - Creating Symbolic Links

Posted At : October 30, 2009 9:36 AM | Posted By : Bob Silverberg
Related Categories: OS X, bash

Although I'm just starting to discover the power of the CLI, I have used it in the past for creating symbolic links, which come in handy in a number of scenarios.

What is a Symbolic Link?

A symbolic link, or symlink as it's often called, is a special kind of file that points to and acts like another file or folder. You can think of it as kind of like a shortcut. Your Mac will treat it like a file or folder, and it therefore allows you to pretend to have the same file or folder in more than one location. When you look at a file listing in Finder, symlinks appear with a little curved arrow in the lower left-hand corner of the icon, and the Kind column reports that the file is an Alias, but it actually isn't.

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OS X Command Line Interface Tips - Customizing the Bash Shell

Posted At : October 28, 2009 1:56 PM | Posted By : Bob Silverberg
Related Categories: Git, OS X, bash

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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