Erco's Mac OSX Page

OSX from the point of view of a Unix savvy developer who's never owned a Mac before. It's a damned good system.

These comments are with respect to the most recent version of OSX, Tiger 10.4.x. Here's my older page for Jaguar 10.1 and back. I skipped over Panther.

Tiger (OSX 10.4.x)

The Good

A lot of man page errors (mentioned previously) have been fixed.
(eg. crontab(5) now exists)

Looks like they fixed the Finder bug with NFS mounts from the command line that caused the Finder to show '0 bytes free' on large mounted volumes that had plenty of space available.

You can eject the CDROM/DVD drive from the command line:

You can burn .iso files to DVD from the OSX command line:

Enabling rsh/rlogin is easy from the command line:

The Bad

You /still/ can't resize windows by their window edges.
Drives me nuts.

AFP and SMB no longer accessable by different users? Something changed in Tiger that prevents multiple users from accessing an AFP/SMB mounted file system.

If I'm ssh(1)'ed or rsh(1)'ed in to access an AFP/SMB share, all users who didn't mount the drive get 'Permission denied', even though the perms are rwxrwxrwx for the files and dirs:

# mkdir -m 777 /smb/meade 
# chown sandro:sandro /smb/meade
# ls -lad /smb/meade
drwxrwxrwx 1 sandro sandro 16384 Jul 28 14:26 /smb/meade

# mount_smbfs //fred:fred@meade/net /smb/meade

# ls -lad /smb /smb/meade
drwxrwxrwx   3 root    wheel     102 Aug 21  2005 /smb
drwxrwxrwx   1 sandro  sandro  16384 Jun  2 18:48 /smb/meade

# su - fred -c 'ls -la /smb/meade'           -- fred can't access the directory
ls: /smb/meade: Permission denied

# su - sandro -c 'ls -la /smb/meade'         -- only sandro and root can (but the perms are rwxrwxrwx!)
[directory listing displays]

This used to work in Panther 10.3.9 and back. When Tiger came out (10.4.0) and all updates since (as of this writing, 10.4.5), this doesn't work. Broken! Reported as a bug over 6 months ago, then closed with "works as intended". Re-opened as a bug in permissions display.

Scary 'rm -rf' command in the stock NFS mounting script.

# sw_vers
ProductName:    Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.4.6
BuildVersion:   8I127

# more /System/Library/StartupItems/NFS/NFS
#!/bin/sh

##
# Network File System
##

. /etc/rc.common

AUTOMOUNTDIR=/private/var/automount

StartService ()
{
    CheckForNetwork
    if [ "${NETWORKUP}" = "-NO-" ]; then exit; fi
    lockfile -r 0 /var/run/NFS.StartupItem || exit 0

    ##
    # Set up NFS client.
    ##
    echo "Starting network file system"

        if [ -d ${AUTOMOUNTDIR} ]; then
                chflags -R nouchg ${AUTOMOUNTDIR}
                rm -rf ${AUTOMOUNTDIR}
        fi
[..]

Someone reported to me they noticed this when they mounted their file system from single user mode, then brought the machine up the rest of the way, and found it running the above 'chflags' command on their mounted volume.. and it was about to run the 'rm -rf' command when he caught the problem and stopped it before it blew away his entire file server..! He logged it as a bug with Apple.

Jezus! At least check if it's a mounted drive before doing that 'rm -rf', damn!