The great thing about running UNIX is that it’s like running around with a loaded gun rocket-launcher with a hair trigger. One of the things that frustrated me the most with Windows is that if something broke, the only reasonable solution was to reformat your hard drive and reinstall.

In contrast, when I used to use Linux, I could spend entire weekends happily byte-editing my filesystem in ridiculous attempts to recover files I had accidentally blown away with an errant rm -rf * (Don’t try this at home!) The challenge was really knowing when to quit. If you were dedicated enough/insane enough/had Asperger’s syndrome, you could probably eventually figure out some tricky nerdy way to do just about anything with a UNIX box (including many things that would probably end you up on the FBI’s watch list.)

Using Mac OS X, I sometimes forget that underneath all that eye-candy sits an official UNIX subsystem (which is actually more than a system running Linux can say.) Until the pretty GUI does something inexplicable and unrecoverable, spitting out a useless error message that doesn’t tell me how to fix things. (Time Machine is beginning to become the bane of my existence!)

So I accidentally stopped Time Machine in a middle of a backup, resulting in a backup file with “.inProgress” tacked on at the end. There was absolutely no way from the GUI to get rid of it. And even when I dropped down to the command line and actually logged in as root (by typing in sudo su from an admin account), I still couldn’t do rm -rf.

Which probably meant that the filesystem was borked.

I quickly learned that I couldn’t unmount the drive in question from the GUI, which meant that I couldn’t get Disk Utility to fix the filesystem.

Until (still as root), I did umount -f /Volumes/Time\ Machine\ Backups. Voila! (Disk Utility is still churning away as I type this, however. We’ll see if it actually works. Well, there’s always fsck_hfs.)

UNIX is the only reason I switched to Mac OS X. Without it, a Mac would just be a prettier version of a Windows box that only 8% of all computer users use.