Knowledge: Getting Your Hands Dirty with Terminal
Posted in Knowledge on June 15th, 2009 by Genaro Bonilla – 1 CommentLets get some work done
Before we get to the particulars, a few things. The commands you are about to see require you to execute them with “Super User” privileges. On unix and unix derived systems like Mac OS X the super user is known as the root user. As root you can do what you want disregarding permissions. You need to be careful. The difference between these two commands may appear subtle (it’s only a space), but one will remove a single folder, the other will try to remove every file on your system.
‘sudo rm -rf /Users/Me/Myfiles/’ is OK and will remove only the folder ‘Myfiles’ in the home directory of the user ‘Me’.
‘sudo rm -rf /Users/Me/Myfiles /’ is NOT OK. It will remove the folder ‘Myfiles’ and then start removing files, recursively, from the ‘/’ (root) directory. This is not a good thing!
If you want to get more information about any of these commands, or any shell command, you can use ‘man’ (short for manual).
‘man ls’ will tell you everything and more you ever wanted to know about the ‘ls’ command (short for list).
This guide and others may contain typos. For that reason you should hesitate to copy and paste commands into the terminal. Take the time to type the command, think about what your trying to do, and if your not sure of the exact syntax have a look at the man page first. Always have a second look BEFORE pressing enter.
