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OSX softwareupdate
July 29, 2006  Posted by Al Castle

add a comment Categories: OSX, Puter Stuff  

This is the first of many OSX related blog posts. I come from the early days of DOS, then into Linux/BSD while working in parallel with Windows when it came out. I’m comfortable with CLI, which I always have a few open and feel hindered if the command or app I want isn’t executable from the console.

Being new to OSX, I find the BSD based guts of the OS familiar and refreshing. I recently just discovered that I can check for, schedule, download and install software updates by executing softwareupdate as root.

It’s no apt-get, but at least there’s something there - without having to open system preferences, click software updates, check now. And yes I have it scheduled for daily, but the point is having the choice and flexibility to do it more than one way.

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Recursive ftp with wget
July 29, 2006  Posted by Al Castle

add a comment Categories: OSX, Puter Stuff  

When I need to transfer files via a network , I’m using a terminal and ssh, or rsync - with ssh. Recently I had to migrate a website from a third party server that offered no shell access and no ssh, all I had to work with was an ftp login.

While I understand you can use some sort of GUI for the OS of choice, but I mean seriously, who still uses ftp? I suppose there’s hosting companies that make use of it, relics from the early days of personal websites. I wasn’t going to find and download some graphical ftp client for this.

The next thing I came to realize is that there was no command for a recursive mget. Err. I wasn’t going to create the directories locally, change remote directory and do a mget zillion times.

I finally remember wget, which supports several protocols and has a plethora of useful flags, including recursive ftp. Alas my OSX laptop does not include wget, which is another blog rant in itself.

The command you’d want to use is:

wget -r ftp://username:password@badhosting.com

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