Command Line

If you have a Touch Bar equipped MacBook Pro and you’re a frequent command line user, you may appreciate a trick that allows you to use Touch ID to authenticate sudo and su, rather than typing out your password in the Terminal like some kind of digital neanderthal.

Some Mac users may need to access iCloud Drive from the Terminal in Mac OS. But if you have tried to access iCloud Drive via command line on your own, you may have noticed it does not appear in the user Home directory. This is because iCloud Drive is actually locate elsewhere in Mac OS, … Read More

MacOS High Sierra includes the all new APFS file system, which is arguably one of the most significant new features introduced in the new Mac operating system update. Nonetheless it’s possible that some Mac owners with SSD volumes will want to not convert the existing HFS+ file system to APFS file system when installing macOS … Read More

You can determine a files encoding and character set through the command line in Mac OS (and linux) by using the “file” command, which helps to retrieve general and specific information about a file type.

The Mac Magic Mouse with multi-touch is fantastic for many users, allowing you to swipe and scroll around through documents by touch alone, but some people may find that they accidentally trigger touch gestures or other scrolling behavior they don’t want. This happens more often than you might think, particularly for people who have come … Read More

Advanced Mac users may wish to shut down a computer from the command line. This can be helpful for remote administration with ssh, in situations where a Mac is booted into Single User Mode, or many other circumstances of troubleshooting and systems administration. There are several ways to shut down a Mac from the command … Read More

Have you ever wished you could access a mapping application from the command line? Now you can with Mapscii, which is sort of like Google Maps or Apple Maps but for the Terminal, with all of the mapping data rendered in ASCII text and characters.

The “man” command is short for manual, and with it you can summon detailed manual page and information on nearly any other command or command line utility that is available, including using an extensive man document search to find related manual pages. While man pages are frequently used and referenced, many users don’t know how … Read More

Some more advanced Mac troubleshooting and diagnostics techniques require a user to access the Terminal from Mac OS Recovery Mode. We’ll show you how to quickly access the command line while a Mac is booted into Recovery Mode.

Command line users may find it helpful to change and rename the file extension of a group of files in a directory. For example, let’s say you have a batch of files with the file extension “.txt” but you want all of those the file extensions to be “.py” instead. That’s what we’re going to … Read More

Need to know what version of Gatekeeper and Xprotect are installed on a Mac? You can find this information through the command line of Mac OS. GateKeeper, MRT (Malware Removal Tool), and XProtect are all built-in features of Mac OS designed to prevent malware threats and other nefarious software from being installed or used on … Read More

Did you know the Mac has a native SSH client built directly into the command line? This ssh client allows for secured connections and remote logins into other machines. Unlike Windows, you won’t need a third party app to utilize SSH for connections into remote computers and devices, because ssh is built directly into Mac … Read More

Want to see the size of a directory from the command line? You may have noticed that using the traditional ls command to list the contents of a a directory won’t necessarily show the total size of a directory. Instead, to see what the disk usage is for a specific directory you’ll want to use … Read More

Mac OS users who have modified their DNS settings may need to clear their DNS cache before the changes take effect. Additionally, sometimes name servers and domains may not resolve as intended if you have stale DNS cache on the Mac, another situation where resetting DNS cache can often be the solution. We’ll show you … Read More

Some of the more privacy conscious Mac users out there might put tape over their webcam or use apps like Oversight to detect camera activity. While either of those approaches can be satisfactory for many users (or considered totally paranoid and overboard to others), many advanced Mac users in the security community go a step … Read More

Using Filevault on a Mac encrypts the entire hard drive and helps protect personal data from theft or unauthorized snooping. It’s a great security feature that many users enable when they’re first setting up their Mac, but some users may enable it or disable it later as well. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but … Read More

Have you ever wanted to know what every single possible terminal command was on a Mac? You can list every terminal command available by turning to the command line. What you’ll see is a significant list of terminal commands with over 1400 possible commands to investigate and use, many of which are either helpful or … Read More

The ‘ls’ command lists all files and folders in a directory at the command line, but by default ls returns a list in alphabetical order. With a simple command flag, you can have ls sort by date instead, showing the most recently modified items at the top of the ls command results. This trick applies … Read More