CertiGuide to A+ (A+ 4 Real)  9  Chapter 7: History, Installing and Use of the MacOS       9  Using the UNIX Terminal

Listing Files and Directories - ls 1 Troubleshooting - Because Even a Mac Can Have a Bad Day

man is short for manual, or help. Think of man as the easy way to look up specific commands online help manual. Simply type man cd, and the command, in this case cd, an entire help manual will be displayed.

pwd looks like password, but it means print working directory. You use pwd to display where you are and what folder you are working within.

cd means change directory. When using cd you must designate the new destination like so: cd /Users/chris/Documents. In other words, you must be specific, down to the folder.

chown change file owner. Use chown to set the User ID and the group ID for specific files and folders.

chmod changes file modes. Chmod is used to change or modify the file bit mode.

top is used to show system usage statistics (as shown in Figure 393)

kill is used to terminate a process. You must always specify the exact command or process after the kill command.

sudo is used to execute a command as another user, one with permission to run that particular command. By using sudo, anyone can “log in” as another user and then perform tasks that they could not perform with their own login. It is important to note that as soon as you login with sudo and give the password, your session is time stamped; you may use sudo for 5 minutes, at which time you will have to reenter the password.

Listing Files and Directories - ls 1 Troubleshooting - Because Even a Mac Can Have a Bad Day