A website tipped me off to a Terminal command that lets OS X users (the geekier ones) view UNIX “man” pages* as PDFs.
However, since the command is long, it would be hard to remember and difficult to type. I wanted to make an alias (a custom UNIX command) that would be shorter, but Bash (the default terminal in OS X) does not allow aliases to accept arguments (variables), which is critical to making this work.
Apple’s OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is a great operating system, clearly their best yet. Nevertheless, there are ways to make it even better. This is my short collection of favorite tips. In this collection, I am focusing on general usability—things that enhance Finder and your general workflow. I’ve added a few general purpose apps that make working with OS X easier.
We had a problem at work in which a shared FireWire drive would unmount when logging out of a user account. This is unfortunately the default behavior under OS X, and there is no easy preference to turn it off. This default behavior is intended to prevent inexperienced users from unplugging a device after they log out, naively thinking it is safe to do so. However, in a network setting when you want a drive to remain mounted persistently, because it is a shared resource, this presents obvious problems. If someone logs out on the computer with the FireWire drive, all network connections are terminated, and anyone trying to read or write to the drive will be rudely cut off, possibly resulting in data loss.
I was happy to find a workaround, and it is pretty simple. Open the Terminal application (in the Utilities folder), and type all on one line (no line breaks): Continue reading