Wilfredo

[prog]

An upshot of losing access to my Linux box for awhile is that I find myself encouraged to explore the arcana of my iBook, which runs OS X -- the operating system one cohort describes as FreeBSD with plastic no-slip bathtub flowers slapped all over it. So it is UNIX, really, and it's happy enough to admit as much, and though the face it presents most of the time is pure, kandy-koated Apple GUI goo, it doesn't flinch when you launch the Terminal application and plunge both arms to the elbow through the console window and into its guts.

I'm by no means a Unix expert, but I like to think I more or less know my way around, and I'm finding some neat stuff already. Allow me to quote from my laptop's factory-default /etc/rc file, edited by Wilfredo Sanchez, a Darwin head honcho whom I actually had the pleasure of meeting at a MacWorld Expo that I (bizarrely) spoke at last year:

##
# Set shell to ignore Control-C, etc.
# Prevent lusers from shooting themselves in the foot.
##

Dude, this is a user-readable file, authored by an Apple employee, front-and-center in every installation of Mac OS X. Yay.