Ten OS X Command Line Utilities You Might Not Know About
The Mac OS X command line interface is home to thousands of programs that the average user doesn’t know exists. Leveraging years of hard work by the GNU foundation and others in the open source community, Apple designed a wonderful OS that doesn’t “need” any use of the command line. While using the command line in Mac OS X is not necessary for the every day operation of a Macintosh, if harnessed correctly, it can save you a lot of time, and occasionally give you a laugh. I hope you enjoy these ten OS X command line utilities!


Pacifist is one of those really useful apps you wish you had that you didn’t know existed. Pacifist is a shareware application that opens Mac OS X .pkg package files, .dmg disk images, and .tar, .tgz, and .tar.gz file archives and allows you to extract individual files and folders out of them. This is useful, for instance, if an application which is installed by the operating system becomes damaged and needs to be reinstalled without the hassle of reinstalling all of Mac OS X.