Mac OS X has deep roots in Unix and at this point, is fully Unix-compliant. It’s common knowledge. That is what we all say, but what does that mean? Well, one of the things it means is that a lot of the things we do in OS X are nice GUIs that let us use Unix command line functionality without having to learn all the commands and variables.
OS X Aqua also lets us interact (hopefully) more intuitively with the operating system — and do things that would be very hard or just impossible in a command line environment. Sometimes, though, the reverse is true and the command line is the easiest, best path to accomplishing a task.
One great example of this is the grep command. It’s really g/re/p, or global/regular expression/print. It’s a text search tool that lets you enter simple or highly detailed search parameters called ‘regular expressions’ and then either print or view the results.
One simple example would be to search every Word document on your machine for the word “Croatia.” Possible in the GUI, but hard to even figure out what the process would be. Finder and Spotlight would be helpful, but neither offer the precision that grep does in this case. One simple command line will give the same results very quickly and easily.
Grep is too deep really go into in a Tech Tails article, so if you are interested, check the grep and GNU Wikipedia pages for more info, or shoot me an email at liam@smalldog.com. (I’ll be blissfully leaving email behind while I’m on vacation, though!)