Tag: unix

Why does the iPhone 5 seems boring?

Apple is not and will not make changes just for the sake of change. And while some may now be clamouring for this change, the paradox is that if Apple did make some big changes, many of the same people would bitch and moan about them. Apple is smart enough to know that in this case, most people don’t want change; they think that they do because that’s the easiest way to perceive value: visual newness. ~ MG Siegler

I watched the event yesterday and grew more excited by the moment. None of what was announced was new or groundbreaking. Most of the hardware aspects of the new iPhone had already leaked out via various tech rumour blogs, and Apple released most of the details of iOS 6 earlier in the year. So what was there to be excited about?

I've been a computer enthusiast since I learned to program BASIC on a Commodore-VIC 20 in 1978. I upgraded to a Commodore 64 in the early 80's then started using DOS and Windows based PC in the late 80s when I went off to engineering college. In graduate school I discovered UNIX and later Linux which came in handy for my first job at a research and development firm. I switched back to Windows when I started consulting in the 90s. I wasn't an Apple user until I purchased my first Mac in 2005. I loved that it had my beloved UNIX but had a usable GUI. At the time, Linux did no offer that.

I started buying other Apple products when I realized how easily they integrated with my Macs. I got my first iPad and iPhone in 2010. When iCloud was introduced in iOS 5 I saw a promise of a future where I could compute, from any Apple device. Mountain Lion solidified that for me. Now iOS 6 brings even more integration.

Passbook promises to relieve my pants pocket of the stress of carrying a phone and a wallet of cash and cards. FaceTime over cellular means I can finally use this feature where it matters to me the most -- when I'm out at events but want to say good night to my kids.

The new Maps will make walking the streets of New York City and Philadelphia easier for me.

SharedPhoto streams means I can share photos of the kids with Grandma and GrandPa -- a $99 Apple TV is easier for them to handle than sending a link to a Flickr photo-set.

The new Phone app (yes, the iPhone makes calls) has my what will be my favorite feature -- decline an incoming call, instantly reply with a text message or set a callback reminder. I get over 200 email messages a day and quite often I miss important messages from the people I care about. The Mail app in iOS 6 will let me set up a VIP list so I';ll never miss an important message from my wife or my bank.

My point in writing this was to state that while the look of the hardware is important, for me it's the software that does the trick of turning, a hunk of electronics wrapped in glass and metal into something useful.

Listing the largest file or sub-directory in the current directory

OS X Daily posted a tip on how to find the largest file in a directory.  I have my own that uses the du UNIX utility.  The du utility displays the file system usage statistics for each file and directory argument. To use it, type du in a Terminal window. The first column of output is the number of bytes and the second column is the directory path and file. If you run this utility in a directory with lots of files a lot of stuff will scroll off the screen. Not very useful.

However, if I combine du with a few other unix commands like sort and head I get something more useful. The sort utility sorts lines of text files while the head command displays the first lines of a file. We will use these commands together in a UNIX mechanism that involves pipes. Piping simply involves taking the output of one command and sending it as the input to another command. This is one of the things that makes UNIX so powerful.

Fire up your terminal and issue the following commands:

du -ck * | sort -rn | head -11

The -ck * tells du to compute the byte total of all files and sub-directories in the current directory and output the results in kilobytes. The output of du is then fed as input to the sort utility. The -rn tells sort to output the sorted results with the largest result first. The output of sort is then fed as input to the head command. The -11 tells head to display the top 11 results. The first line will be the total bytes computed.

You can find out more about these commands by using the man command followed by the command you want information on. For example, man du, will return a description of the du command and how to use it.