Archive for July, 2012

In addition to those on its well-known list of 200+ new features, OS X Mountain Lion also brings along a handful of new UNIX commands and binaries. Most are probably outside the scope of Ask Different (e.g. commands concerning Radius Authentication, Kerberos or Berkeley DB maintainance) but some of them may prove valuable to (aspiring) power users out there. As always, you will find more information in the corresponding man pages.

Administrator commands (/usr/sbin)

sharing – create share points for afp, ftp and smb services

This is a great addition to the UNIX shell level: a tool to create, modify and delete share points (aka shared directories). In its most basic form it can be used like this to add a share for a specific directory on afp, ftp and smb/Samba:

sudo sharing -a /Users/bob/bobs-toolbox

To turn off guest access to the newly-created share, use

sudo sharing -e /Users/bob/bobs-toolbox -g 000

Removing the share entirely is as easy as

sudo sharing -r /Users/bob/bobs-toolbox

In addition, sharing allows for individual names and access rights for all three sharing protocols and access to protocol-specific details.

The only drawback is that the command must always be run as root, but that’s probably only a minor issue for most users and uses.

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In my last blog post, I described my intent to run the Developer Preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion until such time as it was officially released without resorting to installing any third party software. It was in part an exercise in minimal computing and attempting to restrain myself from the temptations of installing (and indeed often being required to purchase) the latest and greatest apps and utilities, and in part an attempt to see if you could really just pick up and use a computer with just the built in software and still get by.

Well, I have to say that whilst I am glad that the OS is finally released and I can thus end the experiment, I am also really glad that I did it in the first place, as I have learned a number of things both about my own computing habits and also, possibly more importantly, about the innate completeness of a modern operating system.

So, first things first, the roll of shame. In my original piece, I said the following:

“I have the Developer Preview sat on my Macbook Air as we speak. And I am going to try my level best to not install a single piece of 3rd party software on it from now until it hits retail”

Did I manage it? Well, no, but then I always knew that there were some things that I could not (yet?) replace. Here is a list of all the applications that I installed over and above the base OS:

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