Command Line

If you use SSH even somewhat often, it would benefit you to setup a basic SSH config file. If you’re curious why, would you rather type something like this: ssh -p 6851 user@servername.domain.com Or just type: ssh name I know what I’d rather do, so let’s get this working. I’m going to use nano editor … Read More

If you want to quickly backup an entire website through FTP, the absolute easiest way to do this is through the command line using the wget command. In fact, you can backup an entire site (or whatever else is on the entire FTP server) with a single command string.

The vast majority of Mac users won’t need to manually tweak launchd and launchctl, but there are times when you uninstall or stop using an app in Mac OS X and a service agent continues to needlessly load in launchd. This is annoying, but these rogue agents are easy to remove via the command line, … Read More

Want to change the crontab editor on the Mac? You can do that! We’ll show you how to use a different crontab editor on a selective per-edit basis, and also how to change the default crontab text editor. You can use vi, emacs, nano, or whatever else you’d like. Most hardcore command line users and … Read More

You can instantly print any Finder items full path and name into the Terminal by dragging and dropping an item from a Finder window and into a Terminal window. Once the Finder item has been dropped into the terminal, the entire path to the item is automatically typed out instantaneously, maintaining both proper capitalization as … Read More

If you’re trying to remember an exact command you executed via the Terminal but can’t quite come up with it, you can query your command line history to discover old commands that have been run or executed in the past. This trick to find and retrieve prior commands executed in the command line works on … Read More

Want to update Mac OS software from the Terminal? You can check for available updates, ignore packages, and install any or all Mac OS X Software Updates directly from the command line. To see what updates are available for a Mac, or to install a software update from the Terminal of Mac OS X, amongst … Read More

If you’ve ever accidentally used cat on a binary file, you’ll have seen the gibberish that results and how it can totally screw up your Terminal window with loads of weird characters. Of course there are many other ways to bork up your command line prompt which seems to become unrecoverable through the typical clear … Read More

One of my complaints with the default Mac OS X Terminal app is that you can’t split the Terminal screen, instead you have to open two windows. Well, this must have annoyed some other developers too because iTerm2 aims to address this problem. iTerm2 is a fork of the original iTerm project for Mac OS … Read More

You don’t need to use iTunes to play music on your Mac, particularly if you just want to play an audio document. Mac OS X comes with an included command line audio player that you can use to play most audio files with. In this example we’re going to use an MP3 file as the … Read More

Do you want to generate a random MAC address? That’s no problem with this neat openssl tip sent in by one of our readers, and you can run the command once or multiple times to generate a randomized MAC address instantly on each execution. This command will work to randomize MAC addresses in in Mac … Read More

Here’s a nice trick if you need to continuously observe your Macs system usage, including disk usage, CPU, and load average. The great thing about this iostat trick is that it updates constantly, allowing for realtime monitoring of system performance, which can be extremely helpful for performance testing and tracking down various processes or activities … Read More

Want to know how fast a Mac is? You can check a Macs processor clock speed, chip type, and CPU architecture a few different ways, but we’ll cover two quick methods to determine the clock speed of a given Mac. First, a super easy glance at processor speed through the GUI, and second, a more … Read More

The fastest way to get MP3 and m4a file info out of Mac OS X is using the Terminal and afinfo command. The command line tool you’ll want to use stands for Audio File Info, rather appropriately. You can try it out yourself with any audio file, though for the purposes here we’re looking at … Read More

You can easily prepend text to a file from the command line by using the following command syntax: cat file.txt | pbcopy && echo “Text to prepend” > file.txt && pbpaste >> file.txt In this case, the file to have text prepended to is ‘file.txt’, replace that with your own document. You may wish to … Read More

You can watch what a process is doing with your filesystem by using the opensnoop command. To try this out, launch the Terminal and then follow along to learn how to watch by applications, file usage, process ID, and more.

Mac users can quickly get the bitrate of any MP3, m4a, or other audio file from the command line of Mac OS X.

This is a really great terminal command that compresses every file within a directory, turning them into a zip archive. We’ll offer two variants of it; one that removes the original source file and leaves only the compressed files, and another command that leaves the uncompressed source files intact. This has been tested and works … Read More