Command Line

From the Terminal, if you want to quickly find out what the largest files are in a directory, try this variation of the ls command: ls -lShr the l flag will display the items in a list, the S flag sorts by size, and h makes it readable in MB/GB (human readable), with r reversing … Read More

We get a lot of comments and inquiries about disabling Spotlight, something that I don’t understand since I think it’s a fantastic application launcher. Opinion aside, if you have disabled Spotlight and want to remove the Spotlight menubar icon from your desktop, type the following command in the Mac Terminal: Remove Spotlight menubar icon sudo … Read More

I have become dependent on many command line applications I have installed through the open source MacPorts effort, and if you have too you’ll really appreciate this guide. When upgrading Mac OS X to a new major OS (say, upgrading Tiger to Snow Leopard) you may notice that some MacPorts installations get screwy and no … Read More

You can easily check the MD5 Hash of any file on your Mac, all you need to do is launch the Terminal and type the ‘md5’ command and point it at the file you wish to check the md5 has for. How to Check MD5 Hash of a File on Mac First launch the Terminal … Read More

Following the CPU usage on my Mac is a mild obsession, and I usually use the Mac terminal command ‘top’ to do this but I noticed that top itself takes up a fair amount of CPU usage (5% or more). I made this complaint to a friend of mine and they told me to try … Read More

You can see a visual preview of a folders contents by enabling a hidden Quick Look feature. This is a rather nice eye candy improvement but I’m not sure that it’s use goes much further beyond that, see the above screenshot and try it out yourself to judge. To enable the Quick Look X-Ray folders, … Read More

Recently the LAN at my office had been running slower than usual, and I couldn’t pinpoint what was using up all the extra bandwidth. I had a suspicion that P2P traffic was to blame but I just couldn’t see anything obvious on the offending machine. So the question of course, is how do you see … Read More

Someone recently sent me a Nero Image File and I had no idea what to do with it, but after some looking around I discovered you can easily convert a Nero image File to ISO format. Apparently the only difference between a Nero Image File and a typical ISO is that Nero adds a 300k … Read More

Ever wondered what shell you are using at the command line? It’s not unusual to want or need to know which shell is running, and though you may hear this question many times, the answer could be different for every user, thus the easiest thing to do is to issue a terminal command which determines … Read More

Do you need to access and mount an SMB share from the command line on a Mac? You may be used to connecting to Windows PC from the Mac networking features to mount a Windows share on Mac, but you can also connect to Samba shares from the Terminal too. This article will show several … Read More

While geeking around I discovered another way to check if your Mac is 64 bit compatible by using the command line. Launch terminal and type “sysctl hw |grep 64bit” Here’s me using the command on my MacBook which does not have a 64 bit processor: $ sysctl hw |grep 64bit hw.cpu64bit_capable: 0 on my friends … Read More

The “uptime” of a computer is how long it has been since it was last rebooted or started up. Since Macs are very stable and generally OS X users rarely have to reboot their machines, the uptime of Macs can reach impressive numbers. You can check the uptime and reboot history of any Mac if … Read More

Bonjour is a great service that runs in the background of your Mac to auto-discover network resources, that is, it’s great until mDNSResponder goes haywire. I was recently in a very creatively crafted network environment that made Bonjour absolutely freak out and tax my CPU with a million processes, so I opted to just disable … Read More

Need a super easy and simple Stopwatch on the Mac, but don’t want to download anything like a third party app or utility? Look no further than the command line. You can create an instant quick and dirty stopwatch via the Mac OS X (or linux) command line by launching the Terminal app and typing … Read More

Have you ever needed to convert a DMG file to ISO in Mac OS, or wanted to convert an ISO file to DMG on your Mac? Converting image files on your Mac is easy thanks to a command line utility included in Mac OS X called hdiutil.

Ever wanted to know if your Mac is using a 32-bit or 64-bit kernel? It may seem geeky and in the weeds, but it’s now relevant. Snow Leopard 10.6 is the first Mac OS X version to ship with a 64 bit kernel, and obviously your Mac has to have a 64 bit processor to … Read More

I have an external drive partitioned in various ways, one of the partitions is formatted to FAT32 and I don’t need access to all the time. So how do I keep that from showing up needlessly when I plug the drive in? Using the command line to create an /etc/fstab entry and a bash script, … Read More

If you ever want to hide a file or folder, you can quickly make it invisible with a command line utility called setfile. This is a really cool tip that should be particularly useful to those who share their mac with other people.