Accessing Bash Command on Lion OS X.

Question

Accessing Bash Command on Lion OS X.

Hello Apple Forum Community. Can anyone help me to understand how you access Bash in Lion (through which Utilities)? If you are not a professional programmer or developer, is Bash command still worthy of being educated about on your Mac? A website was describing a Bash command prompt for UNIX passwords; hence, could using Bash to generate and/or organize your passwords be your best bet? Should we really trust 'random password generator' websites to create UNIX passwords, or are we simply wasting our time if we are really not creating the proper password for our Lion OS X.

What other functions can Bash be useful for? Are there a few simple ways to know and/or get into Bash (to know a few advantageous command prompts) for the general Mac user. Are any Bash commands different for OS X Lion, or are there new ones as well? Thanks.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7), Want it all..but need advice!

Posted on Jul 22, 2011 3:19 PM

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Answer 1

Jul 22, 2011 3:31 PM in response to jedfromnewton

Open Applications->Utilities->Terminal.

I believe the default shell for at least the last few releases is bash, so you'll get straight to it (though I have mine set to tcsh). If not, just type /bin/bash to start a bash shell.

Random password generator sites are fine - all they do is generate a random sequence of characters. However, you're probably going to have to write that password down to remember it, which makes it less secure. Better to come up with a sequence that has some mnemonic meaning to you, that contains uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and other characters, and is at least eight characters long.

I doubt there's any need for the "general Mac user" to be using a shell, but if you are interested in programming or getting to know how the OS works "under the hood", then it's worth learning about. There are any number of good resources on the web about UNIX shells.

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