Was listening to a “computer help” radio call-in show the other day, and wanted to call in and offer some hints, but didn’t really want to sit on hold and have to banter with the screener (not to mention the very nerdly host). I always find this show amusing, especially now that they have Mac people calling in. The Windows folks have questions like “my computer keeps crashing, I think it’s some kind of a virus” or “I installed a card and now my computer doesn’t work” to which the answers are usually something to do with registry settings and antivirus programs and so forth. The Mac people that call in, on the other hand, ask questions like “I’ve got a photoshop file, and I’ve applied a filter effect, and I want to save the results in a print shop format”; they tend to actually be productive and getting work done, while the Windows people are lucky to have the damn thing work at all.
In any case, here’s my hint.
On the Mac, open up Applications, and then open up Utilities. Find the program “Terminal” and run it. Voila – you’ve got a Unix shell! Find a book about Unix (and/or BSD) and learn to grep and rsync and ssh all that fun stuff.
On Windows, get a program called Cygwin. It’s free, and it gives you a Unix shell (which basically emulates a Unix environment) within Windows – sort of like the DOS prompt. Oh, you thought the DOS prompt had gone away? Nope, it’s in C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe (as I recall) and it’s often quite useful for things like basic FTP or deleting files that Windows can’t.