The command line interface is an alternate method of interacting with macOS and Mac OS X, relying on text based command entry to execute commands and perform tasks. It is accessed on the Mac by using the Terminal application. Generally, the command line is considered advanced, and thus it’s usage tends to be more complex than many standard procedures on a Mac.
DS_Store files are hidden system files that reside within almost every folder of Mac OS X, they contain folder-specific information and settings, like what view to use, icon size, and other metadata pertaining to their directory. Though ds_store files are invisible to the average user, if you’re sharing with a Windows PC or have hidden … Read More
Unless it has been disabled, any Finder window in Mac OS X has the View option buttons in the windows toolbar. From left to right you can select icon view, list, columns, and coverflow. You may have noticed the window view style doesn’t always persist across Finder windows though, even if you selected “Always Open … Read More
The clock in Mac OS X sets itself automatically by default, but if you want to set the precise time or are looking for a command line solution to set system time, you can do so with a tool called ntpdate, or the standard ‘date’ command.
TotalTerminal is an excellent tweak for those of us who frequently use the command line, it provides instant access to the Terminal from anywhere in Mac OS X with just a keyboard shortcut. Modeled after the classic Quake console, an official Terminal.app prompt drops down from the top of the screen where you can quickly … Read More
If you’ve ever entered a lengthy command into the terminal and upon execution discovered a syntax error, a “no such file or directory”, or “command not found” message because you made a typo, you’ll love this quick tip that lets you rerun the last executed command while replacing the erroneous syntax. You’ll need to be … Read More
It’s always a good idea to backup a file if you’re going to be making some changes to it and you’re uncertain of the outcome. In the Finder this is as simple as just selecting the file and hitting Command+D to create a duplicate of the file in question, but in the command line you … Read More
Are you looking for a way to make the command line a bit more user friendly? If so, you may find Fish to be a pretty nice alternative shell whether you are completely new to the OS X Terminal or you just want some general assistance when at the command line.
Do you need to check the sha1 hash of a string? You can easily find the sha1 hash of any string from the command line, and this trick works to check sha1 hash from Mac OS or Linux. We’ll use the openssl command to
Setting up SSH bookmarks within Terminal app is an easy way to quickly connect to remote machines. If you haven’t noticed these in Terminal before it’s probably because they aren’t labeled as bookmarks, and therefore the feature gets frequently overlooked by even the most advanced Mac users. Here’s how to create bookmarks within Terminal, and … Read More
The Bzip archive format is generally more effective at compressing than zip and gzip, and while the default Archive Utility or the excellent all-purpose Unarchiver tool will handle unarchiving bzip2 files with ease, you will have to venture to the command line if you want to create a bzip archive in Mac OS X. Creating … Read More
Setting up passwordless SSH logins is a great way to speed up connections to regularly accessed remote Macs and unix boxes. Because not all versions of Mac OS X include the ssh-copy-id command, you may have to use cat or scp to copy over your ssh key. This is how to set everything up, it … Read More
Want to have wget on Mac without Homebrew or MacPorts for whatever reason? You can do that by building wget from source at the command line. The command line tool wget lets you retrieve a group of files from FTP and HTTP protocols, it’s a very useful utility for web developers and powerusers to have … Read More
Platypus is an excellent utility that lets you turn virtually any script into a self-contained Mac OS X application. Free and remarkably simple to use, Platypus will support just about any shell script, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, AppleScript, Expect, and even other scripting languages.
A recent tip covered how to announce when a command line task finished by using OS X’s text-to-speech abilities. The obvious downside to that method is the sound makes it less useful to those who are using Macs in quiet environments like offices, schools, or libraries. An alternate solution is to use growlnotify to create … Read More
Along the lines of vocally announcing task completion within the command line, you can also have Mac OS X speak the output of any executed command.
By appending the say command to the end of another command, Mac OS X will vocally announce when the initial task has finished running successfully. For example, to have OS X announce that a particular script has finished running the command could be: python backup.py && say “jobs done” The important part is the “&& … Read More
If you’re working at the command line and need to quickly empty the contents of a file, you can do so by throwing a greater than symbol and a space in front of the filename in question.
We’ve shown you how to generate MAC addresses randomly and then how to go about changing a MAC address in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, but why have those be two separate actions? Using the command line, you can combine the two events into a single action to generate a valid MAC … Read More
