Command Line

If you spend a lot of time at the command line, you undoubtedly find yourself adjusting and editing text and commands, and you likely often need to move the cursor to a further position in the Terminal from where it’s actively located. Sure you can use the arrow keys to move left and right on … Read More

Mac administrators may find themselves in a situation where they need to display a list of all user accounts on a particular Mac by way of the command line. We’ll review a few methods for advanced individuals to list all accounts, both user and system, on any Mac with any version of Mac OS X … Read More

Polyglots, learners, and the bilingual often want to change their Mac system language for obvious reasons, but another less obvious situation can occur if you’re troubleshooting a Mac that either originates in another country, had the language changed at some point, or is just set to a different language. Since it can be pretty challenging … Read More

For anyone making customizations to their command line appearance, prompt, adding aliases, a new PATH, setting environment variables, or otherwise changing their bash_profile, bashrc, zshrc, and related shell profiles, it’s helpful to know how to quickly reload the profile. Many users simply launch a new shell or open a new terminal window, but there is … Read More

Removing a symbolic link is achieved through the command line, and as we’ll show you, there actually two different ways to undo a soft link. This is aimed at users who spend a lot of time at the command line, but for the less familiar, symbolic links are used in Linux, Mac OS X, and … Read More

Advanced users who spend a fair amount of time in the command line may wish to adjust their sudo password expiration to be more secure (or less secure, by extending the password grace period timeout). Typically this means removing any password timeout so that the default five minute password cache is abandoned, thus requiring the … Read More

Many Mac users running a modern version of OS X El Capitan have noticed the Secure Erase Free Space feature has gone missing from Disk Utility. What the “Erase Free Space” feature did (and still does in prior versions of Mac OS X) was overwrite the free space on a drive to prevent file recovery, … Read More

Most command line users know that the “rm” command for removing and deleting files is quite powerful, able to delete just about any file imaginable within the file system – whether it should be removed or not. Once you add in wildcards and sudo, rm and srm because exponentially more potent and potentially dangerous, so … Read More

It’s well known that all Mac users should set up Time Machine to automate backups of their computer, and while most Mac users let OS X go about backing up to Time Machine at it’s own pace, which sometimes borderlines on glacial, some users may wish to speed the backup process up a bit. With … Read More

Code signed applications allow security conscious users to verify the creator and hash of a particular app to help confirm it has not been corrupted or tampered with. This is rarely necessary for average Mac users, particularly those who obtain their software from the Mac App Store or other trusted sources since the apps are … Read More

Launchpad is the quick application launcher available from the Mac OS X Dock and a keystroke that looks quite a bit like the Homescreen of iOS. By default, the Launchpad app grid usually displays icons in 7 rows and 5 columns of apps, but with a little adjustment from the command line of OS X … Read More

Though just about everyone has our phones glued to us with a dedicated calendar app, for users who spend considerable time in the command line it can be more efficient to stay put rather than stray to another app or pick up a different device to flip around in the calendar and find a given … Read More

There’s no shortage of methods to retrieve a weather report, the web is full of weather resources, everyones iPhone, Apple Watch, and smartphone has a weather app, Siri can tell you the weather, and you can even get the current weather in the menu bar of OS X or from Spotlight on the Mac too. … Read More

Advanced Mac users may find it necessary to view or directly manipulate firmware variables found within NVRAM on the computer. Typically the NVRAM contains specific system data about things like the system audio level, startup disk details, an active user name, screen backlighting and resolution, and other technical details. While most users have no business … Read More

While most Mac laptop users will rely on the battery percentage indicator found in the menu bar of OS X, those who spend a lot of time at the command line may find it useful to know that MacBook battery life and battery charge percentage remaining information can be retrieved directly from the Terminal in … Read More

If you adjust DNS settings on a Mac and the changes seemingly haven’t taken effect, or perhaps you discover that a given name server address is not resolving as intended, flushing the DNS cache is often a quick resolution. Flushing DNS cache in OS X El Capitan (10.11 or later) is easily possible with a … Read More

The Disk Utility app has long contained the ability to verify and repair disk permissions on a Mac, but in the latest versions of OS X this ability has been removed. That doesn’t mean you can’t verify permissions and repair permissions in OS X El Capitan 10.11 and later however, you just need to turn … Read More

For Mac users who utilize third party SSD volumes, the new trimforce command allows OS X to forcibly enable the TRIM function on those drives. trimforce is built directly into newer releases of OS X and is really quite easy to enable (or disable), requiring a quick visit to the command line and a reboot … Read More