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When doing anything from the command line, like using Mac's Terminal or running commands in Linux, dealing with spaces can be problematic... that is, until today!

Spaces function as a separator so something coming after a space will be treated and an independent entity across unix-based systems, like Mac and Linux. For example, if there were a folder named "Green Crescent" and you wanted to navigate inside using the cd command, you might be tempted to type:

cd Green Crescent.

However, this only tells the machine to try to navigate inside a folder called "Green" in the current directory while "Crescent" sort of hangs off to the side like a sixth toe. Assuming you don't have a folder called "Green," you'll probably get a message something like this:

-bash: cd: Green: No such file or directory

What gives? It's that pesky space. Rather than rename your directory, there are a couple of easy ways to deal with this little problem.

Quoting

My favorite for its utter simplicity and universal applicability is to simply put file names in single quotes (') like this:

cd 'Green Crescent'

Single quotes is pretty much a universal way to tell a machine to deal with what's inside of the quotes just the way it is, not to do any fancy stuff.

Escaping

There is another method you should be aware of which is also a great way to deal with a whole variety of scenarios beyond spaces, but works for spaces as well, which is to use the backlash (\) as an escape. What this does is tells the machine to deal with the next character just the way it is, not to do any fancy stuff.

So, you can also deal with the aforementioned space in the file name problem like this:

cd Green\ Crescent

The reason that it's not quite as elegant is that if you have a directory or file name that has a lot of spaces, you'll need to do a lot of escaping. For example, if you wanted to remove...

Getting all the permission correct on one's server can be a major headache. Particularly if you don't know what something like this means: drwxr-xr-x

While most folks that use FTP are used to seeing chmod expressed in numbers like 750, when you run an ls command such as ls -lAh you generally get a bunch of w's x's and r's that might look something like this: drwxr-xr-x (note: the d is the file type which in this case is a directory).

What does this mean? Well, there is a simple way to convert the letters to numbers in your head. Just remember this:

• 4 = r (Read)
• 2 = w (Write)
• 1 = x (eXecute)

So drwxr-xr-x is really a directory with permissions rwx (or 4+2+1=7) and r-x (4+1=5) and (4+1=5) . So that's 755. Got it? It's just that easy.

Google's search engine can do a lot more than search by keywords that you type into their search box. In fact, there are dozens of ways to refine the search. One of the most basic, and most useful, is to get a list of pages for a specific URL.

So, for example, if you wanted to find out about all the pages Green Crescent has indexed by Google you would use the "site" operator like this: site:greenscrescent.com

Google will give you a complete list of pages for any domain you want.

If you're getting into programming, probably one of the first things you should add to your skill set is configuring your "local" which in most cases means your computer to run LAMP - that is Linux Apache MySQL and PHP - these four programs are the mother's milk of most dynamic sites you find online. However, on Mac, you don't need to run Linux since Mac already has a Unix-based operating system (which is very Linux-esque) in which you can run a lot of the same commands and install many new ones as needed.

Rather than giving you the messy step by step that involves modifying Mac source files from the command line, I'll give you the quick and easy way: The good folks at http://www.mamp.info have given us MAMP. Just install it like you would any other Mac application and you're done.