• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Unix

    Basic Bash Functions

    According to @johnkitzmiller, you can’t spell function without fun. So let’s have some fun! What’s a function? Think of it as a script inside a script. Define functions at the beginning of the script instead of making repeated calls to the same task within a script. The other nice thing about functions is that the act of compartmentalization makes them simple to insert into a number of different scripts. For example, if you do a lot of curl commands to pull down something in a lot of different scripts, having the grabbing of the data as a function, then the parsing of it into an array as a function and…

  • Mac OS X Server

    "Simple" OS X Server

    When you install Mac OS X Server you have the option to use Standard, Workgroup or Advanced. I have installed Standard for writing articles/books/etc about it, but from the first day I saw it I knew it wasn’t for me. Workgroup has some augmented record reasons you might use it, but is otherwise similar. Advanced is pretty much, make my server look like it did in 10.4 Server. Here you have Server Admin, Workgroup Manager and the other tools that comprise a Mac OS X systems administrators toolkit. But Standard is synonymous with “Simple” in this case and should rarely be used. If you are fairly non-technical then it can…