I’m an old-school Unix user, like the guy in the Dilbert cartoon.

That is, honestly, the reason I bought an iBook in 2003, rebooting (as it were) my adventures in the world of Apple, after a 15+ year hiatus.

For condescending Unix computer users like me, the best software comes with a command line interface, or CLI.

Macs ship with a terminal and a collection of CLI utilities. Most of those come from Berkeley Unix, however, and they’re not as wonderful as some of the alternatives. You can get those with Fink (my first choice), MacPorts (my second), and more recently, Homebrew.

So this page links to my posts (and is a placeholder for posts yet to be written) describing some of my favorite CLI utilities for the Mac.

The Basics

bash (and perhaps someday zsh)

coreutils, findutils

diff tools.

Compression and Archiving

zip and unzip

Digital Images and Photography

jhead, ImageMagick, various tools to manipulate JPEG images, PNG images, and ICO icons.

Office Applications

(These aren’t apps but utilities for doing things with the documents those apps create.)

antiword

csv-fix