What is Terminal ?

[p.H]

By LordPum

 

Original Post ( Italian ) : http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/222809-terminale-cose/

 

Things about the terminal ?

We may have seen the word "terminal" many times. But not everyone knows what the terminal really is.

First of all, it is an application located in /Applications/Utilities. The use of terminal is derived from UNIX which allows you to control the machine only through the command line. In fact, the terminal is present in OS X because OS X itself is based on UNIX. The usefulness of terminal lies in the fact that many operations can be performed much faster with the terminal and it allows us to use administrator privileges, as may be required.

 

EXAMPLE:

If you want to delete a file from the recycle bin(Or Trash in OS X), but you are told that the file is protected and continuing expunging could do harm to your system. But you're sure that deleting this file won't cause you trouble though system warns. You can try with the terminal.

rm insanely.txt is deleting the file insanely.txt

 

What if you have lots of files which you want to eliminate? You can also use terminal in the following way:

cd .Trash
sudo rm -dfri *.*

After each line, you should press "Enter". The command rm means eliminate, while sudo means that you want to delete as root, the administrator of the computer. You will be prompted for the password every first time you use the sudo command.

Option "-dfri" is needed for this:

- the r is used to delete the subdirectories of the directories in the trash

- the d is used to remove the files in the directory in the trash

- the f is used to force the cancellation or ignored if the file is protected or "apparently "used by some processes

- the i is used to ask you to confirm the deletion of the files. Do not use if you are going to delete many files, but it could be useful in the case where you are unsure of what the rm command would delete.

At last, *. * indicates the file to be deleted. In this case it represents all files in the folder.

 

For more information: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=225608