The Mac OS X Command Line (Mac OS X for Unix Geeks) Chapter 1. The Mac OS X Command Line Contents: Mac OS X Shells The Terminal and xterm Compared Using the Terminal The Services Menu Using the tcsh Shell Mac OS X's Unix Development ToolsThe Terminal application (/Applications/Utilities) is Mac OS X's graphical terminal emulator. Inside the Terminal, Unix users will find a familiar command-line environment. The first section of this chapter describes Terminal's capabilities and compares them to the corresponding xterm functionality when appropriate. The chapter concludes with a listing of the Unix tools that developers can find on Mac OS X. 1.1. Mac OS X Shells Mac OS X comes with the TENEX C shell (tcsh) as the default user shell,[1] the Bourne-again shell (bash), and the Z shell (zsh). Both bash and zsh are sh-compatible. When tcsh is invoked through the csh link, it behaves much like csh. Similarly, /bin/sh is a hard link to bash, which also reverts to traditional behavior when invoked through this link (see the bash manpage). [1]/bin/csh is hard-linked to tcsh. If you install additional shells, you should add them to /etc/shells. To change the Terminal's default shell, see Section 1.3.2, later in this chapter. I. Getting Around1.2. The Terminal and xterm Compared Copyright © 2003 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved.