Chris Stone, O’Reilly and Associates, Inc.
Brian Jepson, O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Track: Mac OS X Tutorials
Date: Monday, September 30
Time: 8:45am - 12:15pm
Location: Camino Real
The tutorial walks through the entire process of enabling a Mac OS X system to email users its regular system maintenance reports. To do this, we’ll start with the basic Unix commands for navigating directories, copying and moving files, editing text files, and working with super-user privileges. We’ll cover the basics of the cron daemon, which is responsible for executing the scheduled administrative tasks, and show how to configure the sendmail mail transport agent to email cron’s reports.
We’ll next explore some variations, which include installing anacron, another open-source alternative to cron. In the process, we’ll show how to install and use the Fink package management system, which makes installing hundreds of other existing Unix application painless for even the most GUI-dependent user.
Finally, we’ll take a closer look at Terminal’s special capabilities, and as an example, create a custom interface for the open-source application, Streamripper, which rips streaming MP3 broadcasts into individual files. We’ll do this by creating a pre-configured “.term” file, complete with its own window appearance and behavior.
Attendees will learn most of the basic skills needed to get started with the Unix CLI (and then some), and will also see these tools working “in action,” put to use in a set of real-world, useful procedures.
