[X-Unix] /dev basics

[Kuestner, Bjoern]

> accessing /dev from the CLI is a very common occurance in the 
> *nix world.  Formatting hard drives and accessing USB/serial ports are 
> just a couple examples of direct access, via CLI, to the /dev tree.  
> Sure, you can use the GUI tools apple provides to format hard drives, 
> but I've grown accustomed to the CLI at this point and can perform most > task much quicker than trying to poke around with a GUI.

Now that sounds interesting.

I remember back in the not-so-good ole days I hosed my iBook with 10.0.
Nothing worked! Nothing. After a kernel panic I could not even boot back
into OS 9. I could get into single-user mode for 10.0 though.

I noticed that some of the partitions wouldn't mount. So I started looking
at the file system utils beyond fsck and reading up man pages all on a
broken OS install. A friend of mine, long-year Solaris admin and recent OS X
user at the time, and I were actually getting to the point where we could
"fix partitions" and got some steps further. We didn't fully recover the
iBook though. So we dropped back and pressed Escape, i. e. reformat and
reinstall and recover from backup.

I wonder if I had known more about /dev if there would have been (or would
be now) a less radical way to fix things. 

Eric, what do you find useful CLI tools on OS X in this context?

Thanks,

Björn







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