There are a couple of ways to suppress these guys:

Apple offers command line instructions to suppress these critters.

BlueHarvest is a $10 shareware control panel to selectively suppress and delete the files.

Note: Remember that OS X Unix utilities will blow out your file's resource fork, meaning that image previews, file types, and other information will be lost. Some files will refuse to work again. If you want to preserve your files just as they are on your Mac, use the included GUI utilities instead.

Tar

GNU tar manual

Archive a directory recursively:

tar cvf mydirectory.tar mydirectory

To extract a tarball:

tar xvf mydirectory.tar

To create a compressed directory:

tar cvzf mydirectory.tgz mydirectory

Gzip

GNU gzip manual

To zip a file called science.txt in place to a file called science.txt.gz:

gzip science.txt

Use gunzip to uncompress the file:

gunzip science.txt.gz

Grep

GNU grep manual

grep [options] "searchstring" [directory / patterns]

Find the string "wilson" in all files in the current directory:

grep 'wilson' *

Find "wilson" only in text files:

grep 'wilson' *.txt

Find "wilson" in .txt files in another directory:

grep "serials" ~/Documents/doug/*.txt

Find "wilson", case-insensitive, print line numbers of results, other directory, .txt files only:

grep -in 'wilson' ~/Documents/doug/*.txt

Web browsers

Safari: Very fast, ships with OS X.

Firefox: Just like the Windows version. Recommended.

Camino and OmniWeb are also very good. Opera is not, don't use it.

Text editors

TextWrangler: Very good and free.

TextEdit: Ships with OS X. Much better than Notepad, but not as good as TextWrangler.

TextMate: Not free, but very good progammer features such as code-folding, bookmarks, and code auto-completion.

Aquamacs: Mac-ified interface for Emacs. If you like Emacs, I recommend Aquamacs.

From the UNIX Terminal: vi, emacs, pico.

BBEdit. Byron reminds me to mention one of the oldest, most comprehensive, and most expensive Mac text editors. If you need its advanced features, BBEdit is worth the money. If you can get by without the HTML tools and snippet libraries, go with the free TextWrangler. How on earth did I forget BBEdit?

FTP clients

Transmit: Limited features, but a very nice interface, very easy to use. I use this one the most.

Interarchy: Much more powerful than Transmit, but more complex as well.

Of course, you can always go command line if you like.

Finder enhancements

The OS X Finder is generally lacking, so here are some add-ons I can't live without:

FinderPop: A very old extension to OS 8/9, finally available for OS X. A very handy pop-up menu and file launcher. My favorite OS X enhancement.

LaunchBar: Fast, unobtrusive file launcher. This is my second favorite OS X add-on. I literally could not work without this tool.

Open Terminal Here: A Toolbar Script from Marc Liyanage that adds a button to open the current Finder directory in the Terminal.

InVisibles: A Toolbar button to toggle invisible files on and off.

PathSnagger: Contextual menu that copies the full path of a file or directory. Very handy.