Re using BBEdit for protected files, nobody has mentioned the open command, which is very useful for connecting the command-line world of Terminal.app to the world of GUI applications (see "man open").
The following shell-script opens anything as root in BBEdit: #/bin/sh sudo open -a /Applications/BBEdit/BBEdit.app $@ Our Mac "newbie" should experiment further with Terminal, it has a number of helpful features. For example, drag-n-drop anything onto a terminal window and the path to that thing (with all special characters escaped) is entered into the current command line. So "ls -a <space> <drag-n-drop folder><return>" lists the contents of that folder.
