Command Line

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

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