The Mac OS X Command-Line Environment
The most important thing to do before porting an application is to familiarize yourself with the Mac OS X environment. In particular, you should familiarize yourself with the System Preferences application (and customize your computer to suit) and the Terminal application (to obtain a command-line interface).
The System Preferences application is located in the Applications folder at the root level of your hard drive. The Terminal application is located in the Utilities folder (which is within the Applications folder at the root level of your hard drive).
Once you have a Terminal window open, you can take advantage of a basic selection of common tools, assuming that they are installed. Before using Mac OS X as a development platform, you should make sure that the BSD subsystem is installed. On Mac OS X v10.4, this option is installed by default, but on previous versions, it was not.
You can check for this by looking for the BSD package receipt, BSD.pkg, in /Library/Receipts. If this receipt is not present on your system, you must reinstall Mac OS X. When you do, you must customize the installation by checking the BSD Subsystem checkbox.
Note: If you have already installed software updates, you cannot simply go back and reinstall over the existing system because of the potential for version conflicts with the software updates. If the BSD subsystem package is not installed, you will have to do an “archive and install” installation, then reinstall the software updates. For more information, see Mac OS X: About the Archive and Install feature.
With the BSD subsystem installed, a look through /bin and /usr/bin should reveal a familiar environment. Welcome home.
Last updated: 2008-04-08
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