Re: Hidden Folders
Re: Hidden Folders
- Subject: Re: Hidden Folders
- From: Roger Howard <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 09:38:37 -0800
On Jan 11, 2005, at 4:58 PM, Gil Dawson wrote:
Hi, Roger--
At 4:32 PM -0800 1/10/05, Roger Howard wrote:
what you expect to do in there via the Finder?
In this case, I had performed an install, and the suggested invocation
did not work, so I wanted the Finder to tell me where the product
landed. I was surprised when the Finder could not find it. I thought
maybe the install had gone awry.
I received numerous suggestions as to what directories to name in
order to invoke pdftotext. Several did not work, but the last one I
tried worked. I suppose this technique is as valid as asking the
Finder to tell me where it is, so long as there's a wonderful group of
helpful people here at my fingertips. <all blush />
This was a problem with the installer, frankly (package installers
aren't typical for shell tools, btw)... anyway, since you're looking
for a shell tool the best place to go would be to the shell. For
instance,
find / -name "pdftotext"
Also, if you're going to spend any time in the shell working with such
tools, then this stuff will become as second nature as glancing at the
desktop, and you'll likely add the path (/usr/local/bin) that pdftotext
was in, into your bash profile so you don't have to key the path in
manually.
The difference between /sw/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, will then all
start to make sense.
Just like I wouldn't expect most people to understand what AppleScript
text item delimiters are without explanation, these things require a
little introduction. There are some great books from O'Reilly that'll
give you all you need to know to teach yourself.
I guess I'm just still saying that there's a good reason the Finder
hides it all - it would be useless to see most shell tools in the
finder, and there are SOOOOO many that people's search results would be
extremely muddied up (not to mention again that Mac users have
traditionally had the bad habit of trashing things they didn't think
they needed). In fact, in the Rhapsody and OSX beta days, this was a
major source of concern from testers, and is a big reason why the
Finder hides it - it was deemed basically too scary/risky to expose to
the typical GUI user, and those who needed to see it would find the
many ways to get exactly what they want. I for one agree entirely with
this strategy; and I spend a lot of my OSX time in the shell, so I'm
not suggesting that this stuff isn't useful, but just that barriers
like this are a good balance. Note, many old time Mac users saw it as a
step backward that OSX offered a shell environment.
-R
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