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anyone actually use terminal/unix for anything?

belvdr said:
You need one terminal window for those pings. Simply nohup the pings and put them into the background.
Click to expand...


Will this work across subnets? Besides that, I need to watch each machine for increased reply times..
 
I use Terminal for cron scripts, enabling features (like debug menu in Safari for instance). Just the regular stuff.
 
I use Terminal to ping other machines occasionally. Other than that I have no idea what to do with it. I wouldn't know what a Cron script was if it hit me on the back of the head.
(Ouch, what the hell was that....)
 
strydr said:
Will this work across subnets? Besides that, I need to watch each machine for increased reply times..
Click to expand...

Subnets are irrelevant. You're speaking of routing, which, if you can ping it interactively, then nohup could surely do it.

So, you're saying that you sit and watch for increased ping times for 50-100 machines? What are you exactly looking for? Ping is not a reliable indicator of anything but network connectivity, and even that's a stretch, when firewalls block ICMP or traffic is too heavy and the packets are not responded too in a timely fashion. In other words, don't rely solely on ICMP packets to give you an overview of the network traffic and load.

At any rate, I would get a network monitor, such as Nagios, and set it up to ping those machines. Then, you can have it email or page you when it goes above a certain threshold or is unreachable.
 
I've been using osx for a year now and recently I've started using the terminal quite a lot, for ssh and I always enjoy a bit of sourceforge action and it does make some task a lot easier like editing various system files. Though if I hadn't just set up a solaris box I probably wouldnt have go into the habit of the terminal
 
MUCKYFINGERS said:
with the beauty and simplicity of the aqua interface, why would anyone bother using unix?
Click to expand...

I use it all the time, but at the moment I can't think of a lot of specific reasons. Short trips to compile bits and pieces of code -- no XCode overhead. Fiddle with permissions/ownership. Remove directories that are locked. (Of course, in Tiger this is easier to do in Finder than it was before.) Of course some applications don't have a GUI. When I write short apps I generally write them faceless, so that means trips to the Terminal to run them and collect output. I also don't like all of the folders that OS X puts at the root level of your hard drive, so I make a lot of that stuff invisible and use the Terminal (or the "Go to Folder..." command) when I want to go in there.

The truth is that there's a ton of stuff you can do if you understand pipes, all the stream filters, regular expressions, etc. I'm not an expert, but I do like the integration between Finder and Terminal: drag files from Finder to Terminal and it pastes in the full paths...type 'open <file>' in Terminal and Finder opens the file just like you double clicked on it.
 
I just like filling my screen with four and typing crap into them and pretending to be a SUPAHACKER!

Yes, I am sad.
 
belvdr said:
Subnets are irrelevant. You're speaking of routing, which, if you can ping it interactively, then nohup could surely do it.

So, you're saying that you sit and watch for increased ping times for 50-100 machines? What are you exactly looking for? Ping is not a reliable indicator of anything but network connectivity, and even that's a stretch, when firewalls block ICMP or traffic is too heavy and the packets are not responded too in a timely fashion. In other words, don't rely solely on ICMP packets to give you an overview of the network traffic and load.

At any rate, I would get a network monitor, such as Nagios, and set it up to ping those machines. Then, you can have it email or page you when it goes above a certain threshold or is unreachable.
Click to expand...


OK, so I'll be specific. I am updating AP's for a health food store chain. Each night I update 2-3 AP's per store, while a crew updates the registers. When the registers are all available, I fail each AP, and watch for unsatasfactory failover. All my tests are run before and after upgrades, so I have a base to judge against. Very boring, but well paid for it.
 
MUCKYFINGERS said:
with the beauty and simplicity of the aqua interface, why would anyone bother using unix?
Click to expand...
Terminal:
FTP - can't upload cause of different OS permissions.
Edit certain files - Pico does the trick, plus it doesn't format it in RTF like TextEdit. Yes I have TextWrangler2, but still Pico is just easier sometimes.
Remove files via root w/out root login - Instead of logging out or switching users, I just su root. Or here's another one sudo su then I login to root using my password.
SSH - I had to check on a server at school, couldn't use Server Admin to connect cause it wouldn't used SSH instead.
Compress files as bz2 or tar - Mac OS X doesn't come with that standard except to compress as zip, but I needed bz2/gz/tar.
List ALL files that you can't see - ls -a
Change permissions manually for WebServer
Restart the WebServer (aka apache)

Need more???

The thing is sometimes there are things that a GUI interface just won't do. Then you have to dig deeper by using a command line based utility.
 
I use it quite often as I am a Linux programmer. I use it mainly to write and run scripts. I also use the ping quite often because my cable modem likes to get messed up often and I need to reboot it.
 
strydr said:
OK, so I'll be specific. I am updating AP's for a health food store chain. Each night I update 2-3 AP's per store, while a crew updates the registers. When the registers are all available, I fail each AP, and watch for unsatasfactory failover. All my tests are run before and after upgrades, so I have a base to judge against. Very boring, but well paid for it.
Click to expand...

Yeah that is an interesting situation. You could nohup them and the output will go to a file. Then you could tail the file to check on them.
 
MUCKYFINGERS said:
with the beauty and simplicity of the aqua interface, why would anyone bother using unix?
Click to expand...


I use it everyday. It's a hell of a lot easier to ssh into a box to run updates and install packages then have to kick the user from their login.

Plus shell scripting makes life a lot easier. Why use a glossy GUI when you don't have to?
 
MUCKYFINGERS said:
with the beauty and simplicity of the aqua interface, why would anyone bother using unix?
Click to expand...

- To access my router running OpenWRT (Embedded GNU/Linux which I
installed on the router myself) and running regular Bash commands on
the router.

- Killing or restarting hosed programs.

- Changing permissions on multiple files.

- Installing programs using fink.

If Mac OS was not unix-based I wouldn't have thought of buying a Macintosh
in the first place.
 
uaaerospace said:
I use it for SSH and for X11 apps on the college of engineering's UNIX machine. Also, just general tinkering is always fun in the terminal. ~josh
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, how in the world could I forget pine? I have dial-up at home (yeah yeah, boo on that) and use pine to quickly check email instead of using the slooow web interface.
 
Wow, how can you not use the terminal?? I use the terminal everyday for everything from compiling code to running python to using all the unix utils like awk/sed/grep. In fact, I wouldn't be an OS X user if it wasn't based on unix or didn't give users access to it. I would be a linux user :D

Honestly, it's the unix core that makes OS X lightyears ahead of Windows, not the flashy GUI. Although that doesn't hurt :p
 
I use the terminal daily for coding (using vi or emacs and gcc). While I could probably do almost all of the same things through a GUI, why would I? Some things just run smoother from a command line.

Its a personal preference. Up until a year ago I was still digging deep into Xcode and the Interface Builder. To mock up code and work out the kinks, however, running everything from the Terminal is just faster. Xcode work comes later.
 
plinden said:
No syntax highlighting or mouse input with vi or vim.

On my Linux and Unix servers, I have native gvim so I'm used to it now. I could use emacs but can't be bothered learning it.
Click to expand...

vim has syntax highlighting, you just have to turn it on.
:syn on

ta-da! I don't know about cygwin, but in a real unix, just create a ~/.vimrc file containing:

Code: 
syn on
set ai

to have syntax highlighting and auto-indent
 
I do for Folding@home, and for occasional maintenance things and to run top, but I'm not all that experienced with it. if it were DOS i'd be set, but I'm a newb to Unix console work
 
I usually do daily, weekly and monthly maintenance tasks from the Terminal as well as update the prebindings every now and then.

Used to use it for Folding at Home, too.
 
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