(no subject)
"cp -r Contents ../../Contents" does it!
I know very little about UNIX, apart from the fact that it runs the core of my Mac...but I've been insatiably curious for as long as I can remember, and if left unsupervised long enough I'm sure to pry open any device that isn't rivetted shut, just to get a glimpse of its workings. My own multithousand dollar piece of hardware being no exception, I browsed a brief online "UNIX for n00bs" tutorial, pried the lid open, and went looking.
When I was younger, there was a freeware program called ResEdit that let you dig through the code of applications and tweak their functions. It was buried in obscure portion of a nondescript segment of one of the last sytem installation floppies, but since I'm apt to pry open any device that isn't rivetted shut, I eventually found it and figured out what it could do...The discovery that software, from the operating system up through applications and documents, was simply comprised of text....long lines of sometimes intelligible text....was one of the greatest moments of my childhood.
Being able to see through and past the colorful clickable icons into the gears and cogs and springs, with the awareness that a human somewhere wrote these lines and symbols, led to the realization that, since a human wrote it must be within the grasp of human comprehension, therfore it must be, theoritically, within the grasp of my comprehension, these mysterious symbols and lines that most people never even see, and that opened world of awe and mystery to my preteenie mind, for whom all formal schooling had involved well-chewed and easily-grasped lessons. I really think that was the first time I had been faced with a knowledge so vastly beyond my current understanding, but still within reach.
(Of course, I was a 10 year old male, so my first action item with this newfound awareness was figuring out how to have the family computer make lewd remarks whenever someone inserted a disk, but anyhow...)
Digging through the UNIX terminal on my mac brought back a bit of that...I discovered with (some toying and a few 'Thank gawd I backed that up' moments) that the command "cp -r Contents ../../Contents" recreates duplicates of all an application's guts in a new folder right outside its original...free for prying and tweaking and contemplating how much depth and mystery can be hiiden in these lil' strings of words. Just like being a nerdy kid again!
(On an off note: I think this is the biggest benefit to being only somewhat nerdy....you lose out in all techno-kung-fu showdowns with genuine techies of course, but on the bright side you get to be absolutely tickled by discovering a nifty new UNIX commands that would surely bore anyone with genuine tech credentials.)
I know very little about UNIX, apart from the fact that it runs the core of my Mac...but I've been insatiably curious for as long as I can remember, and if left unsupervised long enough I'm sure to pry open any device that isn't rivetted shut, just to get a glimpse of its workings. My own multithousand dollar piece of hardware being no exception, I browsed a brief online "UNIX for n00bs" tutorial, pried the lid open, and went looking.
When I was younger, there was a freeware program called ResEdit that let you dig through the code of applications and tweak their functions. It was buried in obscure portion of a nondescript segment of one of the last sytem installation floppies, but since I'm apt to pry open any device that isn't rivetted shut, I eventually found it and figured out what it could do...The discovery that software, from the operating system up through applications and documents, was simply comprised of text....long lines of sometimes intelligible text....was one of the greatest moments of my childhood.
Being able to see through and past the colorful clickable icons into the gears and cogs and springs, with the awareness that a human somewhere wrote these lines and symbols, led to the realization that, since a human wrote it must be within the grasp of human comprehension, therfore it must be, theoritically, within the grasp of my comprehension, these mysterious symbols and lines that most people never even see, and that opened world of awe and mystery to my preteenie mind, for whom all formal schooling had involved well-chewed and easily-grasped lessons. I really think that was the first time I had been faced with a knowledge so vastly beyond my current understanding, but still within reach.
(Of course, I was a 10 year old male, so my first action item with this newfound awareness was figuring out how to have the family computer make lewd remarks whenever someone inserted a disk, but anyhow...)
Digging through the UNIX terminal on my mac brought back a bit of that...I discovered with (some toying and a few 'Thank gawd I backed that up' moments) that the command "cp -r Contents ../../Contents" recreates duplicates of all an application's guts in a new folder right outside its original...free for prying and tweaking and contemplating how much depth and mystery can be hiiden in these lil' strings of words. Just like being a nerdy kid again!
(On an off note: I think this is the biggest benefit to being only somewhat nerdy....you lose out in all techno-kung-fu showdowns with genuine techies of course, but on the bright side you get to be absolutely tickled by discovering a nifty new UNIX commands that would surely bore anyone with genuine tech credentials.)