Terminal ?!

Best I know of is

http://www.osxfaq.com/Tutorials/LearningCenter/

but it looks like the server is down.

You can google up plenty in the mean time.

Commanlinefu has lots of interesting and useful terminal stuff. Not everything works on Mac but a lot of it will. It is geared to Unix but as the core of OS X is Unix a lot of the commands are present. MacPorts is also a useful download as it will allow you to install some Unix tools that don't already exist in OS X.

http://www.commandlinefu.com

I find the free app OpenTerminal extremely useful. Add it to your Finder's custom toolbar (just drag the app to the toolbar) and if you click on OpenTerminal it will open a terminal window at the same location of your Finder window.

http://homepage.mac.com/thomasw/OpenTerminal/

I find it useful if I want to use Unix commands at the current location, such as "grep" for searching the folder's file contents.

doug

One word of advice:-

Be very careful before using any command that starts with 'sudo', you can do a lot of damage if the command that follows sudo starts deleting/moving or otherwise altering system files. Unfortunately there will be a number of commands that require you to sudo.

Slightly expanding on all the above: make sure you always maintain a position whereby you can recover from any calamitous mess-up you commit. The only time in many years I've had to reformat a drive and start again from scratch was as a result of having a little tinker with the terminal.... 😉

No. It's only software. Reformat your drive is worst case scenario. Nothing will get physically damaged, and nodody will die.

DeeOne wrote:

But there is no chance of permanent damage as a result of Terminal tinkering?

Yes there is. If you don't know aboslutely what a particular terminal command is doing you should not be playing around with it.There are a lot of very useful commands you can use for a variety of effects.

But you can very easily screw something up by putting in a command you don't what does at a location you don't recognize.

For example. You have commands that can kill a process. Ones that you can use to clear a cache. Or restart a process. But there are also commands that can delete a file without prompting wheter you want to delete it or not. And other similarly destructive effects.

To me this is ALL completely confusing and a unlogical mess, i have no idea what anything of this does, here`s a link to the original article i found.

http://gdgt.com/question/in-os-x-lion-how-do-you-enable-trim-support-for-ssds-f1 6/

http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/ <---- original article

Step 1 : Backup the kernel extension by using the "cp" command. Kernel extensions talk to the hardware so in case we stuff things up we should take a backup first.

Step 2 : Use the "perl" command to run a small perl script change a certain bit of text in the kext with O's. Perl is a computer language that's very very good at quickly replacing characters in a stream of info. In this case our stream of info is text in a kernel extension.

Step 3 : Clear the kext caches. To make start up quicker OS X builds a cache of the kexts. By clearing it your telling your install to please rebuild it's cache of kernel extension at the next boot time. Which makes sense as you've just made a change in one of those kernel extensions so you want to make sure the cache has those changes in it.

DeeOne wrote:

I understand that i can mess up the OS pretty bad, but i was refering to permanent hardware damage in my above post...

/muses

With the right string of terminal commands I so could cause permanent hardware damage. Bit of a stretch for a terminal newbie to do the same but it's still possible.