Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Continuing discussion on OS X terminology

I have to point out here that a Macintosh is not only a UNIX machine, and slash-delimited paths are not the only way to refer to the way files on a Mac are organized.

For example, run the following one-liner in Terminal:



You'll see that the result differs from the format preferred by deniro solely in that the file path is delimited by colons rather than by slashes. Yes, the colon-delimited file path is a holdover from pre-OS X versions of the Mac OS, kept around to avoid having to rewrite things like AppleScript from the ground up, but the point is that deniro's construction is an entirely logical taxonomy.

Does it allow for home folders in a location other than the default? No. But I'll wager that the number of Mac users who find the distinction between /Library and ~/Library overly subtle and yet have moved their home folders out of /Users is vanishingly small.

I agree that acceptance of a single, standardized way of describing the locations of objects in the filesystem promotes clarity in theory. But to castigate one who finds a reference, made using this standard, unclear as "selfish" is absurd. One could just as legitimately find the person who takes offense at the violation of the standard rather than appreciating the need to find a clearer reference "selfish."

The purpose of language is to facilitate communication. The distinction between /Library and ~/Library has tripped up many an FTM poster and many an MFI poster before them. To me, that's an indication that there's a valid basis for folks to question the use of language that tripped them up.

If we want to insist that people employ ~/username when referring to their home folders on the command line, that's one thing. To insist on it in verbal discussions of GUI navigation is another. Frankly, I find your habitual references to System Preferences as /Apps/SysPrefs to be at least as much of a violation of accuracy as anything posted by deniro.