Please take the time to read this excellent four-part article if you are interested found at Word of His Grace.
http://www.wordofhisgrace.org/godshouse.htm
Also, on an unrelated note, you can find the latest article (Secret Sins) from Free Grace Broadcaster below. I have not read this article yet. However, I can easily endorse this site and its contents so far.
I am unpublishing the previous blog post for the time being, though I appreciate the conversation I had with Tom Parker on it.
![du -ch -d 1 | grep [GM]](http://byroniac.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/du.png?w=257&h=186 "du.png")
There’s a neat command on Macs (and Linux) named ‘du’ which according to the man page (man du) stands for disk usage. Obviously, I’m talking Terminal here, specifically Terminal.app (which in actuality, is not really a file at all, but a folder containing many files which OS X treats as a single file application in the GUI, and if you don’t believe me, drop to Terminal [thought and almost typed DOS] and run “ls -alR /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app | more” which will show you all the files in the application, allowing you to spacebar between screens of information). OK, enough chasing the rabbit. The du command I used specifically (in my home folder, which shows as a tilde “~” in the graphic) was this:
du -ch -d 1 | grep [GM]
Breaking it down, this means (note the special guest appearance of grep):
“du” means disk usage (easy enough, right?).
“-ch” is actually two options I’ve combined for convenience. “c” means show a total (c)ount at the end, and “h” means human readable (always a plus, unless you’re a computer yourself).
“-d 1″ is an option with a parameter. It means folder depth, with the parameter meaning to go only one-level deep in your folder tree.
“|” is the pipe command. I won’t explain that here, except to point out that it takes all the output du generates and sends (pipes) it to the grep utility (for text extraction).
“grep” is a handy-dandy text extractor. I barely know how to use it. So that’s all I’ll say about that.
“[GM]” is the parameter for grep, meaning, blaze through all the data you just got and really just show me the lines with an UPPERCASE “G” (for gigabyte) or “M” (for megabyte). I used these because they make sense in the context of du (and then only with the “-h” option). But keep in mind that grep neither knows nor cares where it gets its input from; its sole concern is to extract whatever text it’s told to.
Basically, what we just did is told OS X to show us what’s in my home folder and show me only the big, important stuff (megabytes, and gigabytes, and I’ll never have terabytes on this machine unless I buy a MUCH larger hard drive).
Well, have fun. Remember, if it goes up in smoke, down in flames, or blows up, I don’t care. So be sure you did your backups first, and don’t tell me how it works out, unless you like it (or have constructive criticism).
P.S. For more information, check out a man page for du.
P.P.S. No, I don’t use a 37 x 12 Terminal window in real life. That was just for this post. 
I bought an iMac. I booted it up on an Ubuntu 9.04 boot CD and… it actually worked! Wowza. I’m already running it virtually in Mac OS X under VirtualBox. If I knew how, I’d create a partition for it and triple-boot with Windows, but I’ll have to research that. I will say BootCamp is wonderful, and I run Vista Home edition (for games). Looking forward to Windows 7 on Oct 22! (Well, that brings everything up to date, I guess).
Download Ubuntu
WordPress is great; don’t get me wrong. But for some strange reason, I feel like moving back to Google blogger. It just feels more like home to me. So in the future I will be posting there.
byroniac.blogspot.com
OK. Well, not really. Sorry, I lied. Well, the Linux part is true (grin). I found out that I can alter the screensaver settings even under Gnome (don’t get me wrong: I love Gnome, but I’m not especially fond of the default “hide everything possible from the user and automatically select default settings for assembly-line/mass-production” design paradigm). Along with that discovery came the information that yes, my Apple2 screensaver module can also serve as an anachronistic-appearing Apple ][e simulated display terminal, complete with ability to run a command shell, such as bash. Yes! And this is the command I used.
/usr/libexec/xscreensaver/apple2 -text -fast -program 'bash'
More information is found on the man page (man apple2).
NOTE: This actually runs in a window and not in true screensaver mode (explaining how to actually modify your screensaver settings under Linux in Gnome is beyond the intended scope of this blog entry. In other words, yes it’s a pain in the neck!)
If you use Fedora Linux, try Fedora Solved for solutions. Also, try Fedora Unofficial FAQ (currently up to Core 5). These are great sites. The folks on IRC network irc.freenode.net in channel #fedora have been very helpful, as well.
7-Zip is the best little archiver you’ve never heard of. Enough said.
They released a whole slew of updates recently that sneaked right under my radar. As of this post, Firefox 2.0.0.1, Thunderbird 1.5.0.9, and SeaMonkey 1.0.7 (a 1.1 beta is also available to show off upcoming new features) are now available. So head on over to Mozilla.com and Mozilla.org and get yourself updated. You have no excuse now.
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