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.
Some advanced Mac users may have noticed that certain shell scripts with cron, cron jobs, and crontab are either not working at all, or not able to function properly in the newest versions of MacOS, notably Mojave 10.14, Catalina 10.15, macOS Big Sur 11, and later. Depending on the situation, this may be accompanied by … Read More
Mac users can download full complete MacOS installers directly from the command line. This is an incredibly useful feature particularly if you want to build USB boot drive installers, you manage multiple Macs, or you simply want to have full access to a complete installer application of MacOS for any other purpose. With this particular … Read More
Want to change the screen brightness on Mac from the command line? You can use the Terminal to adjust screen brightness to be brighter or dimmer with a few different methods, as we’ll demonstrate here. First we’ll show you a handy way to increase or decrease Mac screen brightness using osascript at the command line, … Read More
Rarely, you may attempt to unzip a zip archive and come across an error that states “End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on the last disk(s) of this … Read More
Using SSH, or Secure Shell, is a very common way to establish remote connections to Mac and Linux machines from the command line. If you’re a systems administrator, or if you have SSH enabled on a Mac for another reason, you may eventually need to log off another users ssh connection. There are several ways … Read More
Advanced Mac users who are interested in the world of Information Security (InfoSec) can easily test out ParrotSec Linux in live boot mode by using a virtual machine. In this particular walkthrough, we’ll show you how to quickly get ParrotSec running in live mode within the free Parallels Desktop Lite app, but if you want … Read More
Want to run a simple web server off of an iPad or iPhone? If you have iSH linux shell running in iOS then you can easily start and run a simple web server directly from an iPhone or iPad. By running iSH and starting a web server with python 3 you can then serve either … Read More
Zsh, or z shell, is a popular shell alternative to bash and tcsh, complete with many improvements and customization options offered through the Oh-My-ZSH project. If you’d like to use zsh as the default shell in Terminal for Mac OS rather than bash, you can do so rather easily with taking the following steps:
Have you ever wished you had a Linux command line on an iPad or iPhone? With iSH you can get pretty close to accomplishing that goal. iSH Shell is a Linux shell for iOS that uses an x86 emulator to run a simplified version of Alpine Linux on an iPad or iPhone. You can even … Read More
Advanced Mac users can boot into Single User Mode, which loads directly into the command line of Mac OS and skips the familiar friendly user interface. Booting into Single User Mode on a Mac can be helpful for some troubleshooting purposes and administrative tasks, but is generally best reserved for use by advanced Mac users … Read More
Want to quickly see all Homebrew packages installed on a Mac? You may already know the path where Homebrew packages are installed to, but you don’t need to list a directory structure to get a list of Homebrew packages that have been installed in Mac OS. Instead, you can issue a simple command to show … Read More
If you’re a Mac command line user you may have noticed that many frequently used commands entered into the Terminal (or iTerm) result in an “Operation not permitted” error message since updating to MacOS Mojave 10.14 or later, including Sonoma, Ventura, Monterey, and Big Sur. The “Operation not permitted” error in the Terminal can be … Read More
Command line users are likely familiar with using chmod to set file permissions in numerical or octal format, for example running a command like ‘chmod 755 filename’, but have you ever wondered how you can get file permissions in octal format? If you want to see or view the octal numerical value of permissions of … Read More
Some versions of Mac OS support the ability to login any user account directly to the command line right from the traditional login screen, thereby bypassing the familiar Mac user interface. Instead you’re essentially signing a user directly into the Terminal (a bit like using the ssh client to connect to an SSH server), without … Read More
The Mac operating system has several system level temporary folders which contain temp files used by MacOS itself along with various Mac apps. This temp folders are not intended to be user facing, but in some rare situations an advanced Mac user may find themselves requiring to locate the temp folder and maybe even to … Read More
If you have previously installed Homebrew to a Mac and have now decided that you no longer need or want the command line package manager, you can uninstall Homebrew from MacOS and completely remove Homebrew and all installed packages and formula from the Mac. This tutorial will walk through how to completely uninstall Homebrew from … Read More
Mac command line users may have noticed that FTP is missing from the latest versions of MacOS system software, but despite ftp not being included in newer versions of system software by default, you can still install ftp on Mac OS if you need to use an ftp client or run an ftpd server for … Read More
Every once in a while you may encounter .bin and .cue files, or a cue/bin cue sheet, of a disk image, often when downloading old Mac software (or even DOS, Windows, Linux) for a retro machine, for an audio or video disc, or just as a disk image of something. Mac users therefore may need … Read More
