Activity Monitor and the traditional ‘kill’ command line tool are able to handle most process termination needs, but if you’ve ever needed to target and kill all processes belonging to a single user account, you know it can be a frustrating task. Though Activity Monitor allows you to sort “Other User Processes” and select multiple … Read More

Those familiar with the command line know that running things with super user privileges is typically just a matter of using the sudo command. That still holds true with launching GUI apps into the OS X with root privileges, but it’s not just a matter of prepending sudo to the otherwise useful open command, because … Read More

The standard terminal appearance is just boring old black text on a white background. Apple included a few nice preset themes too, but to really make your terminals appearance stand out you’ll want to take the time to customize it yourself. While some of these tweaks are admittedly pure eye candy, others genuinely improve the … Read More

By turning Option into the Meta key, you will be able to use familiar meta commands to jump around and navigate text in places like Emacs or bash shell without twisting your fingers around to poke at Esc. This won’t be applicable or useful to everyone, but it’s one of those must-use tricks for frequent … Read More

If you’ve ever wanted to document your reaction to an event, task, or specific command execution, now is your chance to get started. With the help of a fun little app called ImageSnap, you can snap pictures with the FaceTime or iSight cameras from the command line. That can be good enough on it’s own … Read More

Ever wanted to see not only every file in a given directory, but all files within that directories buried subdirectories? If you’re looking for what is basically a recursive listing of files in a given folder, we’ll show a great trick for the Mac OS X Finder that allows you to do just that, and … Read More

If your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air feels slow to wake from sleep after it’s been sleeping for a while, there may be a fairly simple cause: standby mode. Standby mode allows a Mac to potentially have up to 30 days of ‘standby’ time, meaning it can sit in a prolonged sleep state for that … Read More

MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit, and a larger MTU size generally increases efficiency of a network connection because each packet carries more data, but sometimes the default MTU sizes (often 1500) will cause issues with some networks and needs adjusting. Changing the MTU size has been a solution to some dropping wi-fi connections in … Read More

Converting images to new file formats is very easy thanks to a variety of tools built directly into OS X (and most Linux distributions). Though the easiest method uses Preview for converting images, there’s a command line option that uses the same sips tool we’ve discussed before to perform batch resizing from the command line. … Read More

Retrieving a list of preferred wireless networks can be helpful when troubleshooting wi-fi problems. The following trick will do just that, and it’s similar to a tip we covered recently which showed how to see a list of previously connected wi-fi networks using either System Preferences or a lengthy command line string, but as far … Read More