Adding GCC, Git, and friends to Path after Installing XCode 4.3

My hard drive died this week, so I decided to purchase an SSD. Best decision ever—my little old macbook is a bazillion times faster. It's always a great feeling to start fresh; I love reinstalling all my apps and getting organized. It's a very empowering feeling to reintroduce order to one's life.

Since I was starting fresh I decided I didn't want to install the old XCode, and so would just skip straight to the new XCode 4.3 Preview, which requires no installers and just comes completely self contained.

However, many of us like to develop outside of XCode from time to time, and woud like to have our compilers, debuggers, and Git available to us. I knew XCode 4.3 was providing these things, because I was able to compile my projects, but they were not showing up when I tried to run them from the terminal.

After a little digging, I finally found the bin folder with all our friends in the package contents of the XCode app. To use GCC, GDB, Git, and other various utilities from the command line, just add this to your path:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin


Enjoy.

Teaching Reverse Engineering

One of my favorite blogs, reverse.put.as, recently re-released an awesome reverse engineering tutorial for OS X. The tutorial is very well done and fG! (the author) also links to an amazing .gdbinit file that really makes reversing much nicer in gdb. fG! originally removed the tutorial because he(or she—not sure) was concerned that some would abuse the information. He made clear in the re-release that his intent was not to abet software pirates, but to educate those with desire to learn a very important skill.

Several of the comments indicate that not all agree with him. I think what they fail to recognize, however, is that reversing is not cracking—cracking is merely one use of reversing. Reversing is necessary in the modern world: we need it to fight malware, discover and patch vulnerabilities, give software developers the freedom of interoperability, and to encourage healthy competition.

Will some people use the knowledge for evil? To be sure; anything can be misused. But others will use it to improve the world they live in. Give people information and let them decide how to live.

Apple_Security++

Recent hires by Apple reveal an increasing emphasis on security. The rise of mac malware, botnets, and research in mobile attacks indicate the need for Apple to take security seriously. Genius hackers like Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi have already been researching Mac vulnerabilities for some time now, and many more are on the way. Hopefully this influx will introduce more tools. Good tools are already available—IDA Pro was recently released natively for OS X—but we need more freely available tools to fuel research and open the doors to more researchers (such as poor students like myself). OS X needs tools like OllyDbg and Immunity debugger. Paterva needs to hurry up—I can't wait any longer. It's an exciting time to be a Mac. Let the fun begin.

Opening Current Working Directory in Finder from Terminal

Sometimes I'm working in my terminal and I really just want to open up my working directory in Finder.

open .

Enjoy.