Mar 5

Handy Terminal commands for Mac OSX Leopard #1

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Howdy! Mac OSX Terminal. A dark scary place full of text. That’s how it feels at first anyway. This is a selection of Terminal Commands that I have found particularly useful. If you are just making your first forays into OS X Terminal land hopefully they will help you out. I’m sure I have left plenty of others out, so feel free to chip in!

SSH:

To Login to a server using SSH:

ssh user@domain.com

(eg) ssh waavooc@waavoo.com (use -p for specifying port)

To Exit from the server

exitof course!

General file browsing creation and permissions in Terminal

To move to a child directory

cd directory_name

To move up a directory

cd ..

Takes you to your home folder:

cd $home

To show file structure for current location:

ls -la

To delete a file:

rm name_of_file

To create an Alias

ln -s ~/the/original/path ~/the/new/path

(eg) ln -s ~/yourapp/public ~/public_html

To view all hidden files in OS X finder

#!/bin/bash
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder


Replace end of second line with FALSE to turn off viewing of all hidden files.

To change the permissions of a file or folder

chmod 755 your.file

The three digit number denotes the privileges you are applying. Generally 755 is quite a good choice if you are in doubt and need more access than you currently have. It will set all rights to the owner (You!) and read and execute rights for everything else. Use 777 with caution, this grants everyone access to all permissions!

To edit a document from the terminal

To edit a document using Textmate:

mate name_of.file

To edit document using Pico. (If you don’t have Textmate , go get it!):

pico name_of_file.php

Terminal Commands for Ruby on Rails

Do these commands from the root folder of your app:

To launch a Rails app.

script/server

To create a controller for your Rails app.

script/generate controller my_controller_name

To create a model for your Rails app.

script/generate model my_model_name

To launch the Rails debugger:

script/server --debugger

To Rake (like Make) a database

rake db:migrate

Note! You can find lots of useful information about the rake command here: http://www.railsenvy.com/2007/6/11/ruby-on-rails-rake-tutorial

To find out where your Ruby is installed:

which ruby

To create a new Rails app:

rails my_app

To create a new Rails app and specify MySQL as the database:

rails -d mysql my_app

To find out which version you are using:

ruby --version

You can do the same thing for Rails and Ruby Gems:
rails --version
gem --version


If you want to shorten things you could do this instead:

ruby -v
rails -v
gem -v


To see a list of the Ruby Gems you currently have installed:

gem list | egrep -v "^( |$)"

To quit a running Ruby on Rails app:

ctrl-c

To install a Ruby Gem

sudo gem install name_of_gem

To uninstall a Ruby Gem

sudo gem uninstall name_of_gem

To update the version of Ruby installed:

sudo gem update rails

To update the installed Gems:

sudo gem update

To update the installed version of Rails:

sudo gem install rails

MySQL commands:

You can get MySQL and lots more besides here: MySQL

May I prod you in the direction of another Waavoo! article that you may be interested in if you are thinking about installing MySQL. There are instuctions for installation of pretty much everything. phpMyAdmin is especially useful 7 step guide for installing Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Apache with PHP, and phpMyAdmin on OSX Leopard

Log in to the MySQL monitor as the root user

mysql -u root

Create a MySQL database once logged in to the MySQL monitor:

create database database_name;

Quit the MySQL monitor

\q

An example of creating a table in the MySQL monitor:

CREATE TABLE posts (
-> id INT (11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
-> title VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
-> body VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
-> post_date DATETIME NOT NULL,
-> PRIMARY KEY (id)
-> );


That’s it for now, I’ll add more in a future post. I hope you find some of this useful!

Posted by: Ian Alexander Wood

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