• All pages now properly accept data in any language, special characters are now properly handled.
• Email notifications for topics you are active in.
• When replying to a topic, the last reply is shown to you for reference purposes (great when answering a post with multiple questions).
• The Connect system is now more refined and displays a top 10 list of your results, with a relative match percentage bar. To see more matches a link is available that will show all possible matches sorted by their relative match score to you.

I hope all of you enjoy these new features and take a few minutes to check them out. If you have suggestions for how we can make FMGreet better - leave us a comment in this blog post!

Opening the Terminal

The terminal can be opened from Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal

Once the terminal is opened you are presented with a command line, this command line accepts typed commands and executes them when the return/enter key is pressed. Previously executed commands can be accessed using the up/down arrows and edited as new commands.

File System Navigation

In order to accomplish anything in the terminal you need to be able to navigate within it to a specific directory. The following commands can be used to navigate:

• pwd - prints the working directory, allows you to immidiately see where you are currently in the system. Sample output: “/Users/mpetrov”
• cd directoryName - changes the current working directory to the specified directory. The path can be absolute (starting with a forward slash) such as “cd /Users/mpetrov/Documents/”, or it can be relative (starting with a ./ or nothing at all) such as “cd Documents” while the current directory is /Users/mpetrov. Both commands achive the same result
• ls - lists files in the current directory, a variation “ls -la” is available to see all the files including special hidden files whose names start with a “.”

Executing Commands

Once you have navigated to the correct folder with your scripts, it’s time to execute them. Command execution in a unix shell is very simple and can be in the form of relative and absolute paths.

• ./commandName.sh - executes the file named “commandName.sh” which is located in the current folder
• ./commandName.sh opt1 opt2 - executes the file named “commandName.sh” in the current folder and passes two parameters to it, “opt1″ and “opt2″. Parameters, also known as arguments, allow you to customize what the command does. For example the command “mkdir test” will create a new directory called test. It knows to create the directory with the name of “test” because “test” is a parameter for the “mkdir” command.
• chmod +x commandName.sh - sets the “execution” flag for a specific command, allowing it to be executed. This is a security feature on all unix systems which only allows files to be executed which have the execute flag set. If you are creating your own scripts you will have to set this flag before you can test it.

Working with Files and Directories

In this section I am going to only list some of the basic commands to manipulate files and directories.

• mkdir directoryName - creates a directory in the current working directory with the name of “directoryName”.
• rmdir directoryName - deletes a directory “directoryName”, the directory must be empty before it can be deleted. Often the “rm -R” command is used instead to delete a directory that has files within it.
• rm fileName - deletes a file in the current directory with the name of “fileName”, will not delete directories.
• rm -R fileOrDirectoryName - deletes a file or directory with the given name, if the given name is a directory its contents are recursively deleted. This means that any files or sub directories will be deleted with this command.

Conclusion

These are just the very basic commands available within the terminal, however they should allow you to navigate through folders and always know where you are currently located. In the future more advanced posts will be added that expand on some other interesting terminal commands.