[Pythonmac-SIG] The unixy stuff in Mac OS X

[Bill Bumgarner]

On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 04:44 AM, Chris Barker wrote:
> My interpretation of that comment is that the Finder, by default, does
> not show the "unixy" parts of the file system (/usr etc.) This makes it
> impossible for users to view/manipulate any of those parts of the file
> system with the finder. If that is where the Python stuff is, it's
> tricky for a user to find whether a given package is installed, for
> instance.
>
> Frankly, this is my number one annoyance with OS-X: if you want to do
> old time command line unix stuff, you can do that, and if you want to 
> do
> all-gui mac-like stuff, you can do that, but never the twain shall 
> meet:
> it is very awkward to switch between the two.

I can understand your annoyance, but I think you'll find that-- in the 
long run-- this approach is generally a feature.

First, you can "go to" any directory on the system from the finder.   
Use the "Go to Folder" menu item in the Finder and type the path.  It 
even has auto-completion as you type (but tends to gravitate to things 
you "can see").   This is useful for browsing header files or the 
python library in the GUI.

Alternatively, from any terminal session you can simply type 'open .' 
and the open command will cause the Finder to open a new window against 
whatever directory you happen to be in.

In general, manipulating the Unix-y stuff from the Finder isn't a good 
idea -- most of the Unix-y stuff is where it is  and is named what it 
is for a reason.  Moving it around or renaming it will very quickly 
lead to unusable components within the system.   Furthermore, most 
Unix-y tools -- including python modules -- have installers that take 
care of putting all the right bits in all the right places.   For 
installation purposes, you pretty much always want to use an installer 
of sometime-- Fink is a great example of a really complex and awesomely 
powerful installer in that it can manage literally hundreds of 
thousands of files through the use of a few simple commands.

b.bum