The history command is a useful way to find specific commands that have been used in the past, and it can also be used to discover what your personal most used commands are with the following command string: history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head -15 The … Read More

Searching the file system for a specific document or file is easy and very fast. Though most users are best served using Spotlight from the menubar, there are times when either Spotlight isn’t working, you need more paramaters, you’re working in the Terminal, or Searching For Files with find The find command is very fast … Read More

You can set unique names for how your Macs computer name appears locally, from file sharing and networking, and even Bonjour services, with the help of the scutil command. This allows you to have a custom hostname for Terminal and SSH, another friendlier name for what’s visible to others on local networks, and yet another … Read More

For anyone who uses the command line regularly, a new tool called pkill makes killing processes significantly easier in OS X 10.8 and later. Improving on the standard kill command, pkill easily supports wildcards, making it easy to terminate all processes belonging to a match or even a specific user. At it’s most basic function, … Read More

Saving a complete listing of files contained with a folder is easy, and there are two quick ways to save that list as a text file. Save a List of Files from Finder The first approach may be easiest for most users and is done through the OS X Finder and TextEdit app, it’s a … Read More

Most Mac OS X preferences are managed through easily accessible control panels, but going behind the scenes with defaults write commands can lead to some genuinely useful tweaks that can only be made through the command line. This list represents a compilation of some of the best defaults write commands out there, and even if … Read More

Bored? Launch Terminal and get ready for some completely stupid tricks to keep yourself entertained. You’ll be listening to Horse Ebooks blab away, watching Star Wars in ASCII, playing retro games, toasting your CPU cores with a repetitive phrase, and even talking to a virtual psychotherapist. The hidden joys of the command line are upon … Read More

If you want to completely peg CPU to stress test a Mac, turn no further than the Terminal. Using the command line you can easily max out all CPU cores and induce huge load on a Mac, making it easy to determine things like what temperature the processor reaches under heavy load, if fans are … Read More

Using the command line softwareupdate tool you can update Mac OS X system software without using the App Store. This is particularly useful for Mac users running OS X 10.8 or later where the software update system is primarily handled through the Mac App Store, but can occasionally either go awry or be inaccessible in … Read More

OS X Mountain Lion ships with PHP 5.3.13 preinstalled, though if you start the built-in Apache server, you will find PHP isn’t enabled by default. Changing this is easy, and if you’re a web developer and want PHP running on your local Mac with OS X 10.8 or later, follow along to have it working … Read More