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Book VIII
Chapter 1
. . . And UNIX Lurks
Beneath
683
Working with Files
Figure 1-3:
Use the man
command to
display help
information.
Then press the Tab key. The result is that the shell predicts that you will
want to type
cd ~/Desktop/
Of course, if you have another folder that begins with the letters De in the
same folder, you might need to type a few additional characters. This gives
the autocompletion feature more information to help it decide which charac-
ters you want to type. In other words, if you don’t type enough characters,
autocompletion ends up like a detective without enough clues to figure
things out.
Working with Files
If you’ve used a computer for any time at all, you’re no doubt familiar with
the idea of files. Even before the first floppy drive appeared in personal com-
puters, operating systems have stored data in files . . . they date back to the
days when a mainframe computer occupied an entire floor of an office build-
ing. Mac OS X is no exception, and it’s important to understand how Mac OS
X arranges them into folders and how you go about accessing them via the
command line. This section describes the basic file and folder information
that you need to know to tame the beast that is UNIX.
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