Comments on: 5 useful Mac OS X command line tips you should know

By: Natty

Natty — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:32:19 +0000

I added the following to my .bashrc file so that my time-intensive commands wouldn’t die if I exited terminal.

shopt -u huponexit
ulimit -s unlimited

By: Eliza sahoo

Eliza sahoo — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:18:23 +0000

Hi,
Though i am not a very technical person.but i found your article very informative

By: robig

robig — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:29:19 +0000

Expanding the possibilities of !! (last command):
!ssh = last command starting with ssh

ctrl+r = reverse search in last commands

ctrl +d = logout (close terminal if enabled in the terminal options)

ctrl +c = abort current command (also when still typing it)

cd foo; .. do somtehing in foo …; cd $OLDPWD

there are sooo many more….
im switched from linux to mac btw

robig

By: DrewMerkle

DrewMerkle — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:48:19 +0000

The true hackers out there will think I’m explaining the obvious, but for me, these were some good discoveries when I learned them. This seems an appropriate place to add them as comments.

The ampersand (“&”) at the end of a command is useful for executing that command in the background and returning control to your terminal, but if you log out (close the terminal window, and so on) that command will be killed. Frustrating for those new to the art of the command line.

Sometimes the “nohup” command placed ahead of the rest of the command line is quite useful in this regard. “nohup” in this case immunizes a command from a “hang up”, which in the dawn of the computer age used to happen to a computer terminal connected via acoustic coupler modem to a mainframe… The ampersand can be combined with “nohup” to immediately send the immunized to the background.

Don’t forget you can pipe the output to a file with the “> file.txt” sort of thing. Example:

nohup command -option -option > output.txt &

Even more fun is the “screen” command. “screen” allows you to create virtual text-mode screens which live on the system even when you log out and you can reconnect to them later to interact if needed. Very useful for starting something, going home, having a family life, and then checking back to see if your very long command has done anything useful.

Type “man nohup” and “man screen” for more information.

By: Ben Oakes

Ben Oakes — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 16:41:34 +0000

Note that the control character sequences listed here (i.e. ^L, ^A) are for Emacs mode. If you’d rather use vi keybindings at the shell, you can run `set -o vi`. (To affect other programs, edit your .editrc and .inputrc.) You start off in insert mode and can enter normal mode using or ^[.

By: Pedro

Pedro — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:10:20 +0000

I find the !! (execute last command) really helpful if I forget to type sudo before a command. You can just type sudo !! and the last command will be executed as root (assuming you’re in the sudoers file).

By: Antonio

Antonio — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:10:08 +0000

So, all of this is “standard” shell use of many unix boxes… Many more things work also in the Mac OS X shell, like Ctrl-a/Crtl-e to move to the beginning/end of the line, etc

By: Antonio

Antonio — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:10:00 +0000

So, all of this is “standard” shell use of many unix boxes… Many more things work also in the Mac OS X shell, like Ctrl-a/Crtl-e to move to the beginning/end of the line, etc

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:38:57 +0000

Hey,

another way to run or rather put a started process in the background is by interrupting the current process with ctrl+z, then typing “bg” to re-activate it in the background. If you happen to need it in the foreground again, simply type “fg”. The latter one does also work for processes started in the background with “&”.