Question

After, reading and understanding Dan Benjamin’s post about installing Ruby, Rails, etc. on OSX (Leopard), I really jumped at using usr/local, maybe at my peril and without understanding it fully. I’ve had no problem running Rails on my local machine, but I still feel like I don’t quite wrap my head around these basic sysadmin practices.

As an example, when I run which git the path my git installation is running from is /usr/local/git/bin/git — does that seem right?

I’ve learned the bulk of my programming thanks to JavaScript, and I haven’t really had to go deeply under the hood of the Mac, but I’m very anxious to use these command line tools and scripts.

Can you recommend a good resource for documentation on basic Unix system administration for beginners (preferably for the Mac-set)?

I realize this might not be totally programming related, but I believe basic shell and command-line scripting knowledge is pretty crucial and I’d like to feel confident moving forward.

Answer 1

For improving your basic shell and command-line scripting knowledge, you don’t need to get into sysadmin tasks. The nearest source of information (though not the most friendly at first) is the man command. Try man bash or man intro. Start by writing small shell script utilities.

About your question on git installation, you can install anything anywhere. But recommended directories are /usr/local/bin and /opt/bin for system-wide tools and ~/bin for your private tools. Usually tools create their own subdirectory in recommended directories where they put doc and resources, such as your /usr/local/git.

For online resources, I assume that you already know how to find the Apple web site and how to use Google.