CLIX pour Mac

This is a remarkable application made by a remarkable developer.It is educational in learning Unix and in fact got me to learn to use the Command Line in MacPorts. Of all the great apps on MU this one is the most useful. You can repair permissions and do many other useful items without delay. I short I give it 5 stars.

Having dealt with Rick for a number of years now on both a business and personal basis I have found him to be an honest, honourable and generous person. ClIX is his gift to the Mac OS community along the lines of 'If you give a man a fish...' has taught me much of what I know of the UNIX command line and saved me many hours - I manage >300 Macs. He does however say what he thinks, often in a non-politically correct manner and as has been pointed out by others, 'not suffer fools...' His products go out of the way to ensure that your security is of primary importance. An extract from a recent XNews focussed on CLIX reads: "Each CLIX command comes with an unseen prefix and an unseen suffix. The prefix zaps the time stamp so you will always detect when sudo is being invoked if that's what you want. A second thread runs asynchronously after every CLIX command to kill the sudo time stamp as well. And the kill operations don't stop at CLIX - they kill timestamps for all TTYs for your own safety." Half of what he writes goes way over my head but it does give me food for thought and makes me a better SysAdmin once I take the time to learn enough to at least understand what he is talking about (technically). If you purchase his ACP product (a must have in my toolkit) it will give you the tools to monitor all traffic and many processes - it has helped me plug several security holes in my network(s) and will certainly provide proof that none of his software 'phones home'. Any one who suggest that Rick is a Black Hat is a best misinformed, and at worst speakin out of the wrong orifice (IMO).

I haven't met this man, nor do I believe too many of us have. I HAVE heard he's had a rough run in life, and may deserve more compassion than he's gotten from the forums here. I've used CLIX for years and I've seen no adverse effects, and I haven't had him take over my machine with my password. I know from reading his blog that he does not suffer fools gladly or at all... I know he's got a temper and isn't Mr Wonderful (my own experience via email with him... I was on his banned list for reasons I've yet to figure out) but he's provided a very useful command-line wrapper, for free. I appreciate that - the other stuff is none of my business.

It seems many other people have had major run-ins with this developer also. Read this page regarding attacks and copyright infringement: http://www.digg.com/apple/What_is_Rixstep_doing_to_Stepwise I certainly would not trust typing in your admin password into an app this developer had created. Make sure you read the above page (URL) before even thinking about using this app. There may be a reason that it's free and that he wants you to use it.

CLIX 2.0.0.11 is released but won't download - so I switch from Safari5 to Google Chrome and rixster.com and they are demanding a name and password ! for FREEWARE ?