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Mac OS X has a split personality. The side that most of users see, and the only one they ever really need to see aside from occasional glimpses of the command line, is the spectacular, Quartz-based Aqua Graphical User Interface, with its dazzling visuals and controversial Dock.

On the other hand, with OS X, the operating system “works” -- the powerful Unix-based engine that lives beneath the Aqua surface -- is easily accessible and manageable by OS X users through the Terminal application, which is why serious computer geeks, who used to superciliously ignore the Mac OS, are now enthusiastically climbing aboard the Mac bandwagon. Apple may have lost the battle for the corporate desktop, but it’s making new friends in the geek/hacker world with OS X.

As the authors of “Mac OS X Hacks,” the latest release in O’Reilly’s new Hacks Series, which also includes “Google Hacks” and “Linux Server Hacks” put it: “Mac OS X is a marvelous confluence of the user-friendly and highly customizable Macintosh of yesteryear and the power and flexibility of Unix under the hood...”

The Hacks Series has begun to reclaim the term “hacking” for the good guys. In recent years the term “hacker” has come to be associated with types who break into other people’s computers to snoop, steal information, or disrupt internet traffic. But the term originally had a much more benign meaning, and you’ll still hear it used this way when developers get together. O’Reilly’s new Hacks Series is written in the spirit of true hackers -- the people who drive innovation.

Mac OS X Hacks, written by Rael Dornfest and Kevin Hemenway, contains an even 100 tips, tricks, and scripts developed by Mac OS X power users and Unix hackers. Each hack can be read through in a few minutes, and this compilation provides a cornucopia of hands-on solutions that can be applied by either first-time or longtime users, and is targeted at everyone from home users to Corporate IT personnel and anyone in between who has a hankering to get more out of OS X.

However, a quick guide as to the relative appropriateness of each hack to different levels of user expertise is provided with a little “thermometer” graphic that appears at the beginning of each topic, with the “mercury level” indicating whether the complexity involved is best suited to “beginner,” “moderate,” or “expert” hackers.

“Mac OS X presents a unique opportunity for combining traditional Unix hacking and Mac OS know-how,” explains coauthor Dornfest. “’Mac OS X Hacks’ goes beyond the peculiar mix of manpages and not-particularly-helpful Help Center, pulling the best tips, tricks, and scripts from the Mac power users and Unix hackers themselves.”

The hack articles are illustrated with plenty of screenshots and graphs, along with command lines and scripts supplied as appropriate.

In Mac OS X Hacks you can learn to:

• Rename your user account or move your whole account to a new system

• Boot from another device or turn your Mac into a FireWire hard drive for fast copying of large amounts of data between to Macs

• Learn to work with audio, video, text, and photos and some unexpectedly useful ways

• Customize the OS X environment to your liking and download useful applications that work the way you want them to.

• Understand all your options for setting up mail, including running your own mail server

• Explore the command line world and build in Unix applications under the candy-coated Aqua GUI.

• Network with Windows desktop, and Unix servers, and other Macs, to share disks, files, printers, or even your Internet connection

• Turn your Mac into a full-scale Web, email, and database server

• Web, Mail, and FTP serving, security services, SSH, Perl and shell scripting, compiling, configuring, scheduling, and general all-purpose hacking.

I’ve included the book’s table of contents in an Appendix at the end of this review, so I won’t redundantly list all 100 hack topics here, but will instead endeavor to provide a brief overview of what is included and covered.

The book is organized into nine chapters, each containing covering a specific category focus.

Chapter One, “Files,” contains hacks that help you use the Mac OS file system more efficiently, adding user accounts, backups, dealing with stubborn Trash, stuck images, jammed CDs, and lots more.

Chapter Two, “Startup,” covers various issues related to the boot process, such as booting from another device, turning your Mac into a FireWire hard drive (Target iDisk Mode), and installing OS X on older, unsupported Power Macs (xPostFacto).

Chapter Three, “Multimedia and the iApps,” is about hacking Apple’s “Digital Hub” applications, the .Mac on-line service, printing to PDF, iPhoto and iMovie, running a Web radio station, PERL scripts for iTunes, and using BlueTooth, among other things.

Chapter Four, “The User Interface”, notes that “Some regard the Mac OS X GUI as a panacea for all the ills of interface design over the years, a breath of fresh air in a world dominated by dusty windows and quivering mice. Some find Mac OS X just enough like a Mac OS 9 to get by, perhaps even grow to love. Then there are those who find it an abomination, fixable by sheer will and determination, something to bend, spindle, and hack until it looks “just as it should.”

This chapter contains 14 hacks to customize and tweak the 0S X GUI, whatever camp you’re in. There is even a section “Dipping Your Pen In InkWell” on using Apple’s InkWell handwriting recognition technology.

Chapter Five, “Unix And The Terminal” gets down to serious geekiness. Providing an introduction to the command line environment for beginners, enabling the Group account, installing the Mac OS X Developer Tools, the Top 10 Mac OS X Tips For UNIX geeks, and a tutorial on running Linux on an iBook.

Chapter Six, “Networking,” covers some of the seemingly endless possibilities for networking 0S X with just about anything, anywhere, including sharing an Internet connection, creating one-wire networks, remote logging in, running Windows on and from a Mac, sharing files between Mac and Windows PCs, and more on BlueTooth connectivity.

Chapter Seven, “Email,” gives you the lowdown on taming Entourage databases, and using the OS X Mail app., using OS X as a mail server with Sendmail, and more.

Chapter Eight, “The Web,” has hacks for search engines like Google and Sherlock, covers saving Web pages for offline reading, and tells you how to set up Apache and a bunch of other server-related hacks.

Chapter Nine, “Databases,” walks you through the installation and exploration of various SQL databases like MySQL, SQL4X, MacSQL, and PostgreSQL.

There is also a 25 page index.

There is plenty of interesting and useful stuff in this book, and if you are the type of Mac user who likes to proverbially dive under the hood and get your hands dirty, you will find that it more than justifies its modest $24.95 price tag.Ê

You can read sample hacks from this book on hacks.oreilly.com : http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mcosxhks/chapter/index.html

Mac OS X Hacks
100 Industrial Strength Tips and Tricks
By RaelÊDornfest ,Ê KevinÊHemenway
March 2003Ê
Series: Hacks
0-596-00460-5, Order Number: 4605
430 pages,
$24.95 US, $38.95 CA, £17.50 UK
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mcosxhks/

Credits

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1. Files

1. Understanding and Hacking Your User Account

2. Taking the Bite Out of Backup

3. Backing Up on the Go

4. Dealing with Archives of Many Colors: .img, .sit, .tar, .gz

5. A Line Break Is a Line Break

6. Fiddling with Type/Creator Codes and File Extensions

7. Locking and Unlocking Files

8. Stubborn Trash, Stuck Images, and Jammed CDs

9. Aliases, Symlinks, and Hard Links

10. Recent Filenames

11. Inspecting the Contents of an .app Package

12. Opening Microsoft Word Documents Without Microsoft Word

Chapter 2. Startup

13. Getting a Glimpse of the Boot Process

14. Booting from Another Device

15. Turning Your Mac into a Hard Drive

16. Using Open Firmware Password Protection

17. OS X for This Old Mac

Chapter 3. Multimedia and the iApps

18. Top iChat Tips

19. AIM Alternatives

20. Printing to PDF or Bitmapped Image

21. Image Conversion in a Pinch

22. Top 10 iPhoto Tips

23. Make Your Own Documentary

24. From Slideshow to Video Presentation

25. Hijacking Audio from Mac Apps

26. Running Your Own Web Radio Station

27. Sharing Your Listening Preferences

28. Controlling iTunes with Perl

29. iCal Calling iTunes

30. Publishing and Subscribing to iCal Calendars

31. Using Bluetooth for SMS and Phone-Call Handling

32. iSync via Bluetooth

Chapter 4. The User Interface

33. Finding Your Way Back to the Desktop

34. Alt-Tab Alt-Ternatives

35. Putting Things in the Apple Menu

36. Keeping Your Snippets Organized

37. LaunchBar, a Dock Alternative

38. DockSwap, Another Dock Alternative

39. Tinkering with Your User Interface

40. Extending Your Screen Real Estate with Virtual Desktops

41. Top Screenshot Tips

42. Checking Your Mac's Pulse

43. Screensaver as Desktop

44. Dipping Your Pen into Inkwell

45. Speakable Web Services

46. Using AppleScript in Contextual Menus

47. Prying the Chrome Off Cocoa Applications

Chapter 5. Unix and the Terminal

48. Introducing the Terminal

49. More Terminal Tricks and Tips

50. Becoming an Administrator for a Moment

51. Editing Special Unix Files

52. Setting Shell Environment Variables

53. Scheduling with System Tasks and Other Events

54. Opening Things from the Command Line

55. Introducing and Installing the Mac OS X Developer Tools

56. Top 10 Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks

57. Turning a Command-Line Script into an Application

58. Installing Unix Applications with Fink

59. Mirroring Files and Directories with rsync

60. Using CVS to Manage Data on Multiple Machines

61. Downloading Files from the Command Line

62. Software Update on the Command Line

63. Interacting with the Unix Shell from AppleScript

64. Running AppleScripts on a Regular Basis Automatically

65. Running Linux on an iBook

Chapter 6. Networking

66. Anatomy of an Internet Shortcut

67. Renewing Your DHCP-Assigned IP address

68. Sharing an Internet Connection

69. Creating a One-Wire Network

70. Secure Tunneling with VPN or SSH

71. Remotely Log In to Another Machine via SSH

72. Running Windows on and from a Mac

73. Sharing Files Between Mac and Windows PCs

74. Mounting a WebDAV Share

75. Mounting a Remote FTP Directory

76. Exchanging a File via Bluetooth

77. Using Your Cell Phone as a Bluetooth Modem

78. Setting Up Domain Name Service

Chapter 7. Email

79. Taming the Entourage Database

80. Using IMAP with Apple's Mail Application

81. Setting Up IMAP and POP Mail Servers

82. Getting sendmail Up and Running

83. Downloading POP Mail with fetchmail

84. Creating Mail Aliases

Chapter 8. The Web

85. Searching the Internet from Your Desktop

86. Saving Web Pages for Offline Reading

87. Reading Syndicated Online Content

88. Serving Up a Web Site with the Built-In Apache Server

89. Editing the Apache Web Server's Configuration

90. Build Your Own Apache Server with mod_perl

91. AppleScript CGI with ACGI Dispatcher

92. Turning on CGI

93. Turning on PHP

94. Turning on Server-Side Includes (SSI)

95. Turning on WebDAV

96. Controlling Web-Server Access by Hostname or IP Address

97. Controlling Web-Server Access by Username and Group

98. Directory Aliasing, Indexing, and Autoindexing

Chapter 9. Databases

99. Installing the MySQL Database

100. Installing the PostgreSQL Database

Charles W. Moore

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