Rixstep
	`About \| ACP \| Buy \| Industry Watch \| Learning Curve \| News \| Products \| Search \| Substack`

Home » Industry Watch

Mac Users of the World Unite!

CLIX is here again and this time with - gasp - file sharing.

Get It

Try It

NUKUFETAU (Rixstep) -- Here comes CLIX 1.8.1d and it's taking no prisoners. This one radicalises the way information is disseminated. Finally. By letting you actually share it.

CLIX is the Command Line Interface for OS X. There's no program like it. None. You get the power of a command line without ever getting near the command line - you get to do all those things your system maintenance utilities are doing - but you get to do them better and you get to do them your way. There's no typing - there's just CLIX!

You have to perform maintenance routines on your computer from time to time. There's no getting away from it. But make a mistake and what happens? There's no such fear with CLIX. CLIX is safer than Terminal - it's a lot safer. And it's a lot safer than those system maintenance utilities you never really understood or felt comfortable with.

CLIX gives you direct access to the full power of your operating system. CLIX makes it easy for you to keep your computer running smoothly; CLIX makes it easy for eager beginners to get acquainted with their systems; and it's an indispensable work of reference for the IT pro too! And it's more convenient than Terminal, it's safer than Terminal, and most important - it's free!

CLIX comes with a choice of two colour schemes: powder blue/beige or phosphor green/amber.

Why It's Safer

CLIX is safer than Terminal. You might already be afraid of Terminal, in which case it's a walkover. But even for experienced users Terminal can be dangerous. There's no 'undo' in Terminal - no 'undo' in Unix. What you do is done - forever.

Consequently it's of the utmost importance to not make a mistake typing in Unix commands; but if they're already typed in and tested all you have to do is click. This isn't 100% security but it's as good as it gets.

Terminal sessions can be hijacked by malfeasants. Specifically by corrupting your so called $PATH variable. But CLIX cannot be corrupted in this regard. CLIX always relies on a special read-only part of your operating system kernel for this value - a value that cannot be corrupted - even by superusers!

Share your discoveries - send your favourite commands to your friends and colleagues.

A rogue process in your system is capable of 'piggybacking' onto your Terminal sessions to 'get root' - and overtake your computer. The attack is patently simple: simply poll continually until you get a 'root shell' through a 'grace period' granted by sudo.

But CLIX protects you here as well. All CLIX invocations are prefaced by special code to remove grace periods and other sudo on disk structures and concluded by doing the same thing. Once you've run a CLIX command even your Terminal will prompt again for your password!

The sudo time stamps used by the system call a 'high level' function to prevent tampering; the values held by this function are propagated when a 'sleeping' machine wakes up again.

This process can take over half a minute. Until the machine fully wakes up sudo still thinks you're authenticated as root.

CLIX takes no chances: it's notified when your computer is going to sleep - and avails itself of the opportunity to again destroy all sudo grace periods and other structures - even an open Terminal window cannot be exploited!

Share the Love

CLIX is all about love of knowledge. Knowledge of how your computer works. The system level commands in CLIX are found in expensive third party products - but the authors of those products don't want you to know what they've done. And it's all there on your hard drives already. If only you could figure out what those products are doing you could do it both cheaper and better - you could learn as you clean and work.

CLIX frees you from the 'servitude' of dependency on such utilities; CLIX 1.8.1d makes it possible to share your discoveries with your friends and colleagues.

Down with the Pyramids

Dr K and especially Rick Falkvinge have long talked about how the Internet age means people can suddenly 'share' rather than 'receive' culture and knowledge. Knowledge as it's been known has been 'pyramidal' in structure, disseminated downwards from the powers that be to - finally - the peons at the base.

Forums and newsletters don't change that enough: people still have to crawl up the pyramid to submit their suggestions. And distribution comes exclusively from the top.

CLIX 1.8.1d changes all that. Have a great command of your own? Send it to whomever you want. Share it. Right now.

Professional Engineering

CLIX isn't some half-arsed half baked 'pseudo' application with more junk in .Trashes than in the app itself. You're not about to find any bugs either.

This isn't your classic run of the mill 'Mac' application. It's a professional tool engineered by real software engineers. It's compact, fast, and eminently user friendly. Yes for professionals - but also for you.

The Army Belvoir Research and Development Center, Apple Computer, the Australian Department of Defence, the Bank of Bermuda, Bank One, the Banque National de Paris, German BASF, Baylor College of Medicine, Boston University, the California Department of Transportation, the California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, the CERN labs in Geneva, Charles Schwab & Co, Cornell University, Corning Inc, the Dartmouth Medical Center, Digital Equipment Corporation, Dupont, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the European Molecular Biology Lab, the European Synchotron Radiation Facility, Florida State University, General Electric, Georgetown University, Georgia State University, Global Crossing, Goodrich, the Government of South Australia, Harvard University, Hewlett-Packard, Hill Air Force Base, the Hiroshima Board of Education, the US House of Representatives, IBM Corporation in Armonk, Austin, and at the Watson Research Center in Yorktown, IKEA, Indiana University, the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Ionian University on Corfu, the University of Istanbul, the Italian Chambers of Commerce, the Goethe University in Germany, Johns Hopkins University, Johnson & Johnson, Kent State University, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lockheed-Martin Corporation, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Los Angeles Times, Massachusetts General Hospital at Harvard, Mattel, the Max Planck Institute, the Medical University of South Carolina, Memphis State University, Microsoft, Minnesota State University, Moscow State University, the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division, the NASA Ames Research Center, the NASA Glenn Research Center, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA Langley Research Center, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Naval Research Laboratory, the New York City Public School System, NOAA, the North Carolina Research and Education Network, North Dakota State University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ohio State University, Oklahoma State University, the Open University of London, the Oulo Polytechnic in Finland, Oxford University, the Pentagon, Kirtland Air Force Base, Pixar Entertainment, the University of Lublin in Poland, Princeton University, Qualcomm, the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, Raytheon, Ritsumeikan University in Japan, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, San Francisco State University, Sandia National Laboratories, Silicon Graphics, Sony of Europe, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems, the Swedish National Assembly, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Temple University, Texas A&M University, the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, Toho University in Japan, the Chicago Tribune, TV Guide, Utah State University, Vanderbilt University, Virginia Polytechnic, the Free University of Brussels, Whole Foods, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Yale University and the Yale-New Haven Medical Center, and the universities of Karlsruhe, Paderborn, Ulm, Antwerp, Belgrade, Bourgogne, Lausanne, Lille, Grenoble, London, Alberta, California, Chicago, Cyprus, Hamburg, Hawaii, Iceland, Illinois, Juvaskyla, Kalmar, Manchester, Massachusetts, Melbourne, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Newcastle, Nijmegen, North Texas, Oslo, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Sheffield, South Australia, Strathclyde, Sydney, Teesside, Utah, Vienna, Washington, Waterloo, Westminster, Windsor, Winnipeg, Wisconsin, and Zurich...

And it's one of a kind. CLIX may be a program that deals in Unix basics but Linux doesn't have it. There's no other program like it in the world. Suddenly you don't have to fear the command line anymore - and you don't have to shell out for less than adequate utilities to get you around that either.

And you don't have to feel like you're getting special treatment: it may be a good way for beginners to start but there's no other way for the professional to organise a workflow either - or how would you go about collecting and archiving over one thousand five hundred Unix shell scripts?

CLIX makes it easy. You keep all you need in a small number of files; after that it's just a few 'CLIX'.

Testimonials

CLIX has been crowned the #1 power tool for OS X. It's been called 'the right mix of power, ease of use, and helpful education' by Mac|Life. iusethis.com says it 'makes Cocktail look like a five minute hack' and goes on to call it 'the best thing in the world'.

The press section of this site is full of accolades for CLIX. So is the CLIX microsite. Take a look.

System Requirements

CLIX needs Mac OS X 10.4 or later. There are no other special requirements. The self contained CLIX bundle takes approximately 200 KB on disk. The 21 CLIX command files and 5 ancillary Unix scripting tutorial files take another 200 KB.

'And that's it.'

Get It Now!

Get CLIX now - click here.