I just finished Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger, and think it is an excellent little resource. I'm recently out of school, a school where we weren't taught anything about Unix, just enough to get by. I started work with the data converter team at Agilent labs, and have been able to glean quite a bit off of them (considering many of them were either directly or indirectly responsible for writing many of them commands in common use today). Thus, I'm often embarrassed to ask them questions about exactly some of the stuff you cover in the book.

Okay, now for the question: at work, they have the terminal set up such that the command line works like vi. That is, if I want to search my command history, I simply change mode via escape, type /pattern_to_be_searched, it finds the command, and then I can use other vi commands to change the command a little bit, and then execute it via the shell. How do I set this up in OS X?

Just bought a new MacBook and love it, especially the ability to run Windows through the Parallels system, but there's one thing that's driving me totally crazy: every once in a while it randomly shuts down with no warning. It's $#@$#@$@# frustrating! What's going on?

Dave, as far as I know, I get a new IP address every time I connect to the Internet with my Apple PowerBook. How do I figure out what address I've been assigned?