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.
If you’d like to find comprehensive system information about a Mac, you’ll find the Terminal is an excellent way to retrieve this data quickly. We’ll provide a handy command that reveals extensive system information about a Mac, including the current system software version and build number, kernel version, boot volume, boot mode, computer name, active … Read More
Need to run a Terminal command as fast as possible? You can do so right from the Dock with this neat trick for Mac.
If you recently installed Oh My Zsh or updated a Mac running Oh My Zsh, you may encounter a large error message screen upon launching new terminal windows. The error usually states “Insecure completion-dependent directories detected”, and showing a series of /usr/local/share/zsh/ directories whose permissions zsh considers insecure. There are two choices to deal with … Read More
If you’re new to VI or VIM, the command line text editors, you may be wondering some of the basics, like how to save files, or how to both save and quit in vim in one fell swoop.
Need to check the sha256 hash of a file? You can easily check the SHA 256 checksum of any file in macOS from the command line. We’ll cover two different command line tools to verify a sha256 checksum on the Mac, and both come preinstalled with all modern versions of MacOS.
If you had previously installed Oh My Zsh on a Mac and now have decided you no longer want it on the computer, you can remove and uninstall Oh My Zsh with a very simple command string.
Wondering where the .zshrc file is located on a Mac? If you’re a Mac command line user who is interested in using and customizing the zsh shell, or using something like Oh My Zsh, you may be curious to know what and where the .zshrc file is located, and how to access it so that … Read More
Want to try out Oh My Zsh in your Terminal? Oh My Zsh is a popular zsh configuration manager, offering tons of themes, functions, helpers, plugins, and other handy features for command line users. It’s used heavily by many who spend a lot of time in the command line, whether for development, administration, or just … Read More
If you want to change your MAC address in macOS Monterey or Big Sur, you can use the traditional method to spoof a MAC address, or you can use a slightly easier approach by using a command line tool called spoof-mac. We’ll be covering the mac-spoof method here, which relies on HomeBrew.
Some Mac Terminal users may discover git, pip, HomeBrew, and other command line tools may fail or not work as intended with an error message stating “xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools)”. Sometimes these command line tools stop working after a macOS system software update, but they worked previously. Fortunately it’s easy to fix … Read More
Can’t log in to your Mac because you forgot or lost your user password? That can be stressful, but don’t freak out quite yet. Whether it’s your primary admin password or password to a standard user account on someone else’s mac, you can reset it in a couple of minutes.
Want to update Homebrew and your packages? Of course you do! Homebrew is a popular package manager for Mac that easily allows users to install and manage command line tools, apps, and utilities, typically familiar with the Linux and Unix world. Because it’s a package manager, you won’t need to manually build anything from source … Read More
If you’re a Homebrew fan and an Apple Silicon Mac user, you’ll be happy to discover the latest versions of Homebrew (3.0.0 and beyond) now natively support Apple Silicon architecture. You’ll still need Rosetta 2 to have some packages and formulae to work, but many are already native supported by the command line package manager.
If you’re one of the early adopters who acquired an M1 Apple Silicon Mac and find that Homebrew and many other x86 terminal apps don’t yet have support for the new Arm architecture, you’ll be happy to know there’s a fairly simple workaround. The trick is to run a parallel Terminal application through Rosetta. And … Read More
Ever wished you could see the transfer progress and speed of copying files at the command line? If you’re familiar with the command line of Mac OS, Linux, or any other Unix operating system, you likely use the ‘cp’ or ditto commands to copy files, directories, and other data. The ditto and cp command is … Read More
Advanced Mac users may wish to convert a MacOS Installer application into an ISO file. Typically the resulting installer ISO files are used for installing macOS into virtual machines like VMWare or VirtualBox, but they can also be used to burn the ISO to media to create a boot disk. This offers an alternative to … Read More
Need to quickly see a list of all cron jobs on a computer? You can easily see all scheduled cron jobs by using the crontab command, and seeing cron data works the same on Mac as well as Linux and most other unix environments too. Perhaps you have a script or task running and you’re … Read More
Want to re-enable the startup boot chime sound effect on a new Mac? You can do that with a command line string entered into the Macs Terminal. As you may know, new Macs default to not making a startup boot chime sound effect, this is in contrast to every prior Mac model which included a … Read More
