A Tour of the Mac OS X /bin directory

On my copy of Mac OS X Mountain Lion, the /bin directory contains 38 binaries.

[

the condition evaluation utillity. Used in shell scripting to evaluate expressions. Is exactly the same at the 'test' utility.

bash

a popular unix shell

cat

a utility that reads the contents of files and writes them out to STDOUT. cat can number lines with the n switch: cat -n <filename>

chmod

modifies the unix permissions of files. This tool is key to making files readable, writeable or executable.

cp

copies a file or can copy a list of files into a directory

csh

another unix command line shell. This shell is older than bash and is sometimes seen used in startup and configuration scripts.

date

displays or sets the date or time