It turns out there are some pros and cons to running on Macs for doing these activities. Here are some updates on how to efficiently work on a mac:
- You don’t need Cygwin at all since X11/XWindow is included in the operating system already!
- You don’t need something like WinSCP, since you can use SFTP to transfer files from a local computer to the remote computer. Here’s how:
- Open a terminal window on your local computer.
- Use cd and ls to get to the local directory on your hard drive where you have files you want to send to the remote computer.
- Type sftp user@host to connect to the remote computer. Enter your password.
- Use cd and ls to get to the directory on the remote system where you want to put the files from your local system.
- Type put filename to transfer a file to the remote system. You can also use mput *abc to transfer multiple files (in this example, everything ending in abc). The asterisk is a wildcard; it matches any character, any number of times.
- If you want to transfer in the other direction, i.e. from the remote machine to the local machine, use the get and mget commands, which work just like put and mput.
- Summary of useful sftpcommands:
- get filename Copy a file from the remote computer to the local computer.
- mget filenames Copy several files from the remote computer to the local computer. Can use wildcards.
- put filename Copy a file from the local computer to the remote computer. Use -r if you want to upload a whole directory. Note that the command can’t create a directory that already exists, so when you’re on the remote computer, use mkdir to make a new directory that matches the one you want to copy first.
- mput filenames Copy several files from the local computer to the remote computer. Can use wildcards.
- cd path Change directories on the remote computer.
- ls List the files in the current directory on the remote computer.
- pwd Display the path of the current directory on the remote computer.
- lpwd Display the path of the current directory on the local computer.
- lcd Change directories on the local computer.
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Thanks for the blog. I’ve found mac OS X convenient for water resources engineering type research. Macports, having an X server, and unix terminal have been highlights for using open source / research focussed software and connecting to linux compute servers (in addition to porting code to linux).
Perhaps the main ‘con’ I have encountered is the performance of office suites on Mac. I’ve yet to find a spreadsheet that performs adequately on the mac platform.
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