Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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CHAPTER 18 INTRODUCING DARWIN AND THE SHELL
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
^G Get Help ^O WriteOut ^R Read File ^Y Prev Page ^K Cut Text ^C Cur Pos
^X Exit ^J Justify ^W Where Is ^V Next Page ^U UnCut Txt ^T To Spell
As you can see, at the top of the window Nano identifies the open file, and at the bottom it
provides a list of common actions. The action list at the bottom will change based on
circumstance—for example, when you go to save a file (using ^o), you will be prompted for the
file name you wish to save our file as. The action list will also provide some other saving options
(creating a backup, appending this file to another, etc.). With the short help file included with
Nano, plus the adaptive action list shown, I’m going to forgo the table of commands since it
would largely be redundant.
File Permissions and Attributes
File permissions are a central concept found in traditional UNIX systems. They allow one user to
share files with everyone else on the system while still maintaining control of those files. The easiest
way to view these permissions and attributes is with the ls -l command. For example, one
line from an ls -l command may look like this:
-rw-r--r--- 1 scott scott 409 May 17 10:44 soliloquy4
The first string of 11 characters represents our permissions. Also of interest here are the
file’s owner (scott) and the file’s group (also scott).
The first ten characters are broken down as follows:
NOTE The 11th character is special and indicates additional file attributes or security applied
to the file. This will be covered in the “ACLs and Extended File Attributes” section.