Beta Zero <beta_zero@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
> Back in December, when I bought my Mac 'mini,' I discovered a handy
> little icon on the right side of the bottom tool bar - I think that Mac
> users call that kind of a toolbar a 'Dock' - and it lets you try out
> Unix, and learn as you go. I don't have any real experience with Unix,
> and this is the first Mac I've ever had. Quite pleased with the
> purchase, all in all. But I'm still learning how to use a Mac.
>
> So . . . a few months went by, and a week ago I bought a book about
> Unix for the 'Tiger' species of the Mac. It's a pretty big book, and
> I'll admit I haven't exactly read it all the way through yet. I'm
> pretty new to Unix.
>
> Is it possible to add commands to Darwin?
If you're talking about running Terminal.app and entering commands into
a command prompt, then yes! The key thing to realize is that, when you
enter a command like "ls", the command shell usually doesn't call an
internal function called ls(). Instead, it looks on your drive, in a
series of locations that you can define, for an executable file named
"ls", and if one is found it runs it.
You can write these "commands" - more commonly called tools - in pretty
much any language you can think of. C, Objective-C, C++, shell scripting,
Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, etc. - and that's just what's included with the
OS. There's far more out there for the downloading. One reason why geeky
types often prefer a Unix variant is the huge array of programming tools
and languages that are available for it.
sherm--
--
My blog: http://shermspace.blogspot.com
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net
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