Hello,
Thanks for the info. Any and all information is usefull to many of
us, I'm sure. Like you, that is what I love about this list. Again,
thanks for the post.
Dan
On Feb 23, 2006, at 10:09 AM, Rick Boggs wrote:
Hello Dan and all,
I very rarely post here, but I find this list to be very
informative and worthwhile reading. I read this post from Dan and
decided to share it with a very close friend who works in the
Computer Science Department at USC. I will share his response
here, in the hope that some folks will find value in it.
Rick Boggs
Morning Rick,
Mac OS is unix under the hood. Mostly a BSDish flavor of Unix
utilities running on top of the Mach Microkernal with a BSDish
service presenting the Unix interface combined with GNU's gcc and
libraries for building things. The Terminal program defaults to
using the Bash shell which comes from the GNU people (Free
Software Foundation). So all Bash commands work. Aqua would be
analogous to the X Windows System in other forms of Unix. Its a
Windowing system using Finder as the Window manager. Now X was
meant to be a networked window system and while Aqua as some of
those features it is tuned to be a single machine's window system.
This was the architecture of NeXT Step and Mac OS X is really NeXT
Step + an Apple style interface. This is true even today at
version 10.4.x.
Now from a programming perspective this is very cool. For the
average user it doesn't impact them. Its like a body of a car,
Aqua is the body, Unix is the engine, drive train, etc.
Because Mac OS X is Unix you can do all your unix things assuming
the programs you need are installed. Now modern Unixes tend to
come with more then you need, Apple has chosen (probably a wise
choice from a support point of view) to only include what they need
by default. Because of Apple's NeXT Step heritage you don't see the
usual assortment of stuff in /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/include, /
etc, /var and so on. If you need development tools then you need to
install them, if you need other server stuff then you need to
install them, etc. I recommend using OpenDarwin Ports (<http://
www.opendarwin.org>http://www.opendarwin.org/) for getting the
usual set of Unix tools and services that you'd find by default
with most Linux distributions. You need to read through the docs
on Open Darwin because there are some pre-requisites that need to
be in place (I vaguely remember having to install the Mac OS X
developer tools before installing Darwin).
Once Open Darwin is installed the Unix under the hood is remarkably
similar to BSD, Linux, Solaris, etc.
Hope this helps,
Robert
Origianl Message:
Hello Scott and everyone else,
You know, that brings up a point.
While I can certainly understand trade secrets, many of us are
already familiar with Linux and Unix and such. I wish there was
much more information on the different processes used in Apple's
flavor of Unix and in particular how the GUI apps work with the
underlying Unix. and the other way round. Furthermore, I wish
there was much more information available on Mac's terminal,
including Sin-tax and anything especially pertaining to Mac and
its particular flavor of Unix.
Just a thought, along with your questions regarding mail processes.
Dan
On Feb 19, 2006, at 7:47 PM, Scott Howell wrote:
Folks, I got to thinking and yes nothing good comes of me
thinking. In any case, when I was running my Linux box, I used a
program called Fetchmail which would poll a mail server/servers
and dump mail into /var/spool/mail. Now I haven't been able to
locate any info that covers how mail works in great detail, but
what I was curious is if it would be possible to use a program
like fetchmail, have it pull mail down from a server and Mail
make use of it. I suspect Mail wouldn't do this very easily as it
seems it either imports mail from /var/spool/mail or such
directory or Mail simply pops the server itself and the mail is
placed into the mail directory in the local user's home folder.
Anyone have some insight into how Mail works? Is it possible to
run Mail as a cron job and have it pickup mail that way?
tnx
Scott
