BSD General Commands

But how do you print, preferable to a PDF file, all of the pages in the manual?

I'll check out the books later, thanks. And I like that YouTube link too.

<sigh> I need to be cloned to get everything done. LOL

Thanks for this, Bob. Copied and pasted to Notes, as well as printing it.

This looks great. Thanks. Bookmarked and printed.

$40 is a good price, but at the moment not in this Mac user's budget. :-(

Forgot to post this a couple of days ago...

Thanks to everyone who've helped me find some answers.

BobHarris wrote:

A shell (back in the good old days) was a thin veneer between the user's fingers and the commands they would invoke. The shell put out the command prompt. When the user typed a command and then hit <return> the shell would do minimum parsing on the command (such as finding each word in the command based on the white space between them). It would look at the first word and see if it could find a program that had the exact same spelling. If it found a program that matched the spelling it would run the program and pass the remaining words from the command line to the program as arguments.

The shell would then wait for the program to finish.

When the program finished, the shell would output the command prompt and wait for the next command.

Again, simple program in the early days.

The basic concept remains, but the shell has more capabilities, but its primary job is to find programs based on the spelling of the first word in a command you enter.

Then , in essence, it's a mini-OS. Working like DOS, no GUI.

BobHarris wrote:

One of the things Unix did from almost the beginning was allow users to choose a different shell, which could have different rules, but more important, it allowed creative individuals to improve on the existing shell or invent their own. Those that became popular flourished.

The opposite of what Microsoft does, correct?

BobHarris wrote:

Also, I'm not sure the web page I pointed you at is all that complex. And since you said you were retired, you should take up a hobby. Learning the command line is an excellent hobby 🤪 

"Complex", in the case of the web page, probably depends on the reader's general knowledge. Just a lot more info than I'm currently looking for.

I like finding ways to make a job easier, which means learning the OS in addition to software. Most people I encounter don't care about learning either one. :-( When I learn or notice something that hadn't "registered" earlier, I usually want to know why. More on this at the end of this message.

As for a hobby, it's old and long gone railroads in this area. One of my "dream jobs" was to operate a steam locomotive. And I actually got the chance to that for 6 summers.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jg_qedH3i0 It's not the Union Pacific's Big Boy, but it was fun! If you want to skip the Corvair portion, got to 2:45 in the video. I'm the engineer and interpreter in the video.

BobHarris wrote:

But back to the original question, or maybe I should ask: "What is your goal?" Maybe there is some other way to approach it, and we could be helpful in that way, instead of teaching your all about the beginning of Unix back in the '60's and '70's.

The best question that could be asked!

Bought my first Mac in 2009, joined the Mac club, and have been attending the SIG groups meetings ever since. 1 of 2 meetings held each month.

At the last SIG, renaming and sorting files in Finder was the main topic. The presenter had a bunch if files that sorted as follows.:

Test1

Test2

Test3

Test4

Test10

Test11

Test12

Test20

Test21

Test22

Etc.

Wait!!! That's not what I learned years ago. It should sort as follows:

Test1

Test10

test11

Test 12

Test2

Test20

Test21

Test22

Test3

Test4

"Why?" popped into my head. I'm the one who asks the questions no one else thinks of or is interested in, so kept quiet. It was bad enough the meeting used ZOOM.

When I had the the time to pursue the "Why?", I wondered how the files would sort in Terminal. I fooled and fussed and pharted around enough to discover the ls command, and displayed the files with the correct path.

UH OH! I expected a single column of filenames as you get with the DIR command in DOS. But no, Terminal gave me rows and columns, like a spreadsheet. Do I read left to right, top to bottom, or top to bottom, left to right?

After a bit of reflection, I thought there was probably a way to tell the ls command to display the files in a single column. But how?

Somehow, all this got me a manual page for BSD General Commands and it immediately occurred to me the answer was probably in this document somewhere. If I could only print it out and have it all in one place at the same time...

And, here we are. Back to my original post. In lieu of a PDF file to download, how about a way to just print the file(s) from my hard drive? And all of then in a single PDF file. Surely that is possible. :-)

Off topic, but it really frustrates me about Apple not telling you of everything that is on the computer when you buy it. Curl being one of them.