[Jerry Jorgenson]

Unix operating systems natively use whitespace for separators. If you only use the Apple (OS X) GUI, it hides this from you, but if you use the command line (terminal window), you need to enclose whitespace separated names in quotes:

Example:

cp “my file” “my new file”

Some programs don’t know to quote whitespace. If you’ve never had a problem, then you don’t have any of those programs.

[Jerry Jorgenson]

Upgrading OS X Server from Leopard to Snow Leopard is a pain, but just Leopard to Snow Leopard hasn’t posed any problems for me. I’m not looking forward to Lion though.

[Jerry Jorgenson]

Version 10.6.6

$ touch abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890
$ ls -l abc*
-rw-r–r– 1 jerry staff 0 Mar 21 09:28 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890

Doesn’t seem to happen on mine. Are you running in 64bit mode?

You can tell because the Activity Monitor will show (64 bits) on some programs.

[Jerry Jorgenson]

– What I’ve heard is that there is something to do with where the computer stores the data

Unix systems guarantee that the first write will be in a contiguous area. If you don’t have enough free space the filesystem will either have to move files around or (worse) give a filesystem full error. Generally as long as there is 15% free it’s not going to be a problem.

– is there a utility that I can use to rearrange the data on my drive?

There are several:

Finder (GUI)
tar (command line)
mv (command line)

– Is this defragmenting?

No. Defragmenting is different. There are utilities that can defragment a Mac, but they seldom need to be used because of the way Unix filesystems operate.

– Will I be okay now that I’ve just moved a bunch of the media to externals?

Yes.

[Jerry Jorgenson]

cd /drive mount point that you want to inventory.

find . -type f -exec ls -al {} \; | awk ‘ {print $3″, “$5”, “$6, $7, $8”, “$9 }’ > file_for_drive_1.csv

Note that using -type f will get all the files so -name “*” is redundant in this case.

If you don’t want the hidden files use -exec ls -l rather than -exec ls -la

If you wanted to put them all in the same file, just change > to >> The >> is append.

[Jerry Jorgenson]

There is an easy way. Open up terminal.app (under the utilities folder in Applications) and type

last

You’ll get a list like this showing the user name and login/logout times :

$ last
jerry ttys060 Wed Feb 9 11:20 still logged in
jerry ttys014 Tue Feb 8 09:25 – 15:30 (06:05)
jerry ttys021 Thu Feb 3 11:28 – 11:28 (00:00)
jerry ttys021 Thu Feb 3 11:26 – 11:26 (00:00)

[Jerry Jorgenson]

To get rid of the sluggishness you typically use one of the many disk cleaning programs that are out there such as CleanMyMac https://macpaw.com/. These are especially good if you’ve loaded up your filesystem to over 85% full. (Unix filesystems start slowing down when the drive gets too full).

A reinstall is only necessary if something is actually corrupted. Because OS X uses a journaled filesystem, they is a very rare event.

If you open console.app (found in applications under the utilities folder) and select “all messages” before you try burning, you might get some additional information about why you can’t burn.

[Jerry Jorgenson]

The first thing to find out is if you can get from the iMac to the PCs. Open a terminal window and do a traceroute. It should look something like this:

(nekokun is a system on the local network)

$ traceroute nekokun
traceroute to nekokun.j3issint.com (192.168.1.113), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 nekokun.j3issint.com (192.168.1.113) 0.864 ms 0.285 ms 0.196 ms
$

If you can’t get there, then there may be something wrong with the PC network cards or routing on the PCs. You’ll have to use the network control panel to figure out what.

If that works try pinging something outside the network from the PC also try pinging your iMac.

$ ping https://www.creativecow.com
PING https://www.creativecow.com (64.71.189.236): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.71.189.236: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=54.098 ms
64 bytes from 64.71.189.236: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=53.943 ms
64 bytes from 64.71.189.236: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=53.976 ms

If that doesn’t work, check the firewall settings (if any) on the router.

[Jerry Jorgenson]

Lowel makes a range of portable lighting equipment that doesn’t require permanent mounting. So do others, but the ones I’ve used are from Lowel.