In spite of the fact that a lot of people seem to loathe the colorized ls functionality, I sortof grew up on it(so to speak). OS X, by default, does not have this functionality(well, at least, GNU’s –color option never works). I figured the quick and easy way to solve this was to install coreutils, but I found another option. It appears OSX included a version of ls that works with ls -G. The coreutils one is (by it’s virtue as a GNU tool) probably more feature-driven, but realiasing it as
alias ls=’ls -G’
is probably a little easier to swallow, and certainly faster if you’re not a die-hard fan of some certain functionality in coreutils ls.
In other news, it finally really bugged me that OSX didn’t have a watch command. There’s sortof all kinds of stupidity about this floating around too, but I couldn’t find a good way to get it without recompiling. The watch program resides in the procps package for Linux, and you can download it here. Once you’ve downloaded it, open a command window and type in:
tar xzf procps-3.2.7.tar.gz; cd procps-3.2.7
cat make.patch | patch
make watch; cp watch /usr/local/bin
And then enjoy your watchy-goodness. And maybe delete the tarball and the associated directory. Oh, and make.patch is there for ya.
It’s true. He did grow up on this. Which means that in order for me to protect him from the scum of the universe, as well as support him in his quest for bigger things, I had to try to have a clue about what he was up to. Which means that I actually understand this post! OK, I had to read it twice. But it means my watchy-goodness paid off for both of us.