Linux person uses (tries to use) Mac OS X

[Amanda Yilmaz]

> For anyone who intends to work at the operating system of a Mac, be
> aware
> that some Mac keyboards do not include the '|' (ie, pipe-to} symbol.
> 
> The ls command now has an option ls -more to make up for the common
> command sequence ls | more.

While I'm not an Apple fan (not any more, anyway), I find it difficult
to believe Apple would make it impossible to type such an important
character as "|" on any modern keyboard layout.

Depending on the keyboard layout involved, however, it might be in an
unexpected place.

For example, if it's a British keyboard (easily distinguished by the
existence of the pound symbol "£" rather than "#" on top of the "3"
key), "|" will usually be found at the bottom left of the keyboard,
directly to the left of the "Z" key.

If it's a standard Canadian French keyboard ("É" at the bottom right
next to the right Shift key, French-style quotes ("«»") to left of "Z"),
"|" will usually be found at the top left of the keyboard, where "~"
usually is on US/Canadian English keyboards.

Some international layouts, such as the "Canadian Multilingual Standard"
layout (an alternative French-capable layout seen on older Macs and some
other machines, distinguished by having separate keys for the
grave-accented letters "À", "È" and "Ù", with "Ù" lying to the left of
"Z") don't have "|" as one of the normal marked keys, but will allow you
to type "|" using an Option-key combination (Macs) or AltGr-key
comination (PCs).  ("AltGr" is the right Alt key, which is marked
"AltGr" rather than "Alt" on most international keyboards, and is used
as a third-level shift key in the same way the Option key is used on the
Mac.)  The Swedish/Finnish layout is another example of this, where (on
PCs) you must type AltGr-< to get "|".

To make things even more interesting, the powers that be in certain
countries' standardization organizations apparently found it important
to distinguish between the solid bar "|" (the standard ASCII character)
and the broken bar "¦" (apparently an old EBCDIC character, now Unicode
U+00A6), and to mark them both on the same keyboard.  For example, as
noted earlier, British keyboards generally have the solid bar "|" on a
separate key at the bottom left next to "Z", but you will also see a
broken-bar glyph "¦" at the top left on the same key as "¬`"; typing
AltGr-` will produce the broken bar "¦".  Needless to say, using the
EBCDIC broken bar "¦" rather than the standard ASCII "|" in a *nix shell
is unlikely to have the desired effect.

Compounding this further, some keyboards (including mine) actually show
a broken-bar glyph "¦" on the physical keyboard even though the actual
character typed for that key is the solid bar "|".  In addition, in many
console fonts the glyph for ASCII "|" actually looks like a broken bar
"¦", presumably for historical reasons.  This is probably similar to the
situation with "^", which formerly appeared as an up-arrow "↑" in the
early days of ASCII.

Of course, on most modern computers and operating systems you can just
change the keyboard layout in software and forget the whole thing.

Amanda
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