Mac Terminal

The bouncing Dock icons are a nice GUI feature but for some people they’re just really annoying. You can disable the Dock icon bounce notifications in Mac OS X by using the command line, so launch Terminal and enter the following:
Disable Dock Bouncing:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool TRUE
killall Dock
Re-enable Dock bouncing by entering these commands:
defaults [...]

TTYtter is a rather fun command line based Twitter client. Written in Perl, it’s got all the essential ingredients needed for basic Twitter needs without ever leaving a Terminal window.
Running TTYtter is easy enough, it just needs your login information and off it goes. You can either run it through perl with:
perl /path/to/ttytter.pl -user=username:password
or [...]

In trying to lock down the machines in a small Mac lab, I came across an interesting piece of advice from John Mairs who was tasked with basically the same thing. He suggests disabling access to System Preferences because it “accomplishes (and halfway accomplishes) several things. First, it completely prevents students from changing all settings [...]

Spaces is a really nice feature of Mac OS X that lets you place different windows and applications within their own workspace. Dragging a window to a new Space is just a matter of holding onto the window and pulling it towards the end of the screen. You may have noticed that there’s a [...]

It’s easy to accidentally change directories to something you weren’t intending to (say, accidentally hitting cd and returning home and losing your place in a complicated directory structure), but thankfully there’s a command that will immediately take you back to the previous directory:
cd -
It’s that simple, cd – will take you to the directory you [...]

Here’s how to lock down the Mac OS X Dock, all of these commands need to be issued at the command line via the Terminal, so once you’re there enter the appropriate command:
Lock the Dock to Prevent Changes to Contents
defaults write com.apple.Dock contents-immutable -bool yes
Lock the Dock to Prevent Changes in Size
defaults write com.apple.Dock size-immutable [...]

Using the command line tool ‘opensnoop’ you can track any Mac applications (or system process) usage of the file system. This is a very handy tool for administrators and troubleshooting! The simplest way to use it is as follows:
sudo opensnoop -n Safari
You can also track a specific file, and what is accessing it, like so:
sudo [...]

Yes, you read that right. You can use your Mac as a psychotherapist from the Terminal, thanks to emacs. It’s pretty amusing, and here’s how to do it:
* Launch the Terminal
* Type ‘emacs’ and hit return
* Press Shift+Escape keys, then hit X
* Type “doctor” and hit return
* Mac psychotherapist to the rescue! See the screenshot [...]

Snow Leopard changed the way the Dock behaves when a Dock item has been clicked on and held down, since 10.6 it launches Expose for that specific application. You may recall how Leopard handled the click-and-hold though, which was to launch the contextual menu (the same one you get when you right-click in 10.6). Using [...]

Like many of us, I’ll be quite busy over the Christmas holiday visiting friends and relatives out of town. I regularly use my home machine as a local fileserver though and other people in the household are dependent on it being up and running. Now here’s the situation I’m presented with: I leave town [...]