Want to know how fast a Mac is? You can check a Macs processor clock speed, chip type, and CPU architecture a few different ways, but we’ll cover two quick methods to determine the clock speed of a given Mac. First, a super easy glance at processor speed through the GUI, and second, a more … Read More
The fastest way to get MP3 and m4a file info out of Mac OS X is using the Terminal and afinfo command. The command line tool you’ll want to use stands for Audio File Info, rather appropriately. You can try it out yourself with any audio file, though for the purposes here we’re looking at … Read More
If you’ve used a tool like DaisyDisk to analyze your Mac’s disk space usage, you may have come across a file named ‘sleepimage’ that is rather large. What is sleepimage in Mac OS X? The ‘sleepimage’ file is just what it sounds like, it’s what your Mac had in it’s memory when the machine went … Read More
You can easily prepend text to a file from the command line by using the following command syntax: cat file.txt | pbcopy && echo “Text to prepend” > file.txt && pbpaste >> file.txt In this case, the file to have text prepended to is ‘file.txt’, replace that with your own document. You may wish to … Read More
You can watch what a process is doing with your filesystem by using the opensnoop command. To try this out, launch the Terminal and then follow along to learn how to watch by applications, file usage, process ID, and more.
Mac users can quickly get the bitrate of any MP3, m4a, or other audio file from the command line of Mac OS X.
This is a really great terminal command that compresses every file within a directory, turning them into a zip archive. We’ll offer two variants of it; one that removes the original source file and leaves only the compressed files, and another command that leaves the uncompressed source files intact. This has been tested and works … Read More
If you’re new to using the command line and trying to learn the Terminal, setting a cheat sheet of command syntax for commonly used tricks as your background picture can be a pretty helpful way to help remember commands.
You know those Motorola Droid commercials where a robotic voice says “Droid”, or more accurately Drooooid? Oddly enough, your Mac may have been the originator of this sound, and without any additional software you have the ability to play and save the sound yourself right in OS X.
If you’re tired of looking over a man (manual) page within the Terminal, you can use a nifty command sequence to launch any specified man page into the Preview app of Mac OS X. This is done by piping the standard man output into the open command and Preview. Launching the man Page into Preview … Read More
You already know that you can take screenshots from the command line on Mac OS X, and now using a simple tool called webkit2png you can quickly take a screenshot of any webpage from the command line too.
If you need to convert a .docx file to .doc, don’t pay for one of the many conversion sites or utilities out there. Your Mac has the ability to handle the file conversion entirely on it’s own already built in, and it’s completely free, no downloads or third party software is required. To convert the … Read More
You can use the tab key to auto-complete paths within Go To Folder on the Mac, a particularly handy trick to keep in mind the next time you’re navigating directory paths on the Mac. Tab key auto-completion is a feature that many command line users are familiar with, particularly those with a unix and linux … Read More
Mac OS X includes Samba support by default, which allows for communication between OS X and Windows PC hardware. SMB is what enables simple Mac to Windows file sharing, but you can also go further and utilize the command line of OS X or Linux to remotely monitor, start, and stop services running on Windows … Read More
Need to change the hostname of a Mac? For most people if you want to change your Mac computer name you just do it through the Sharing system preference, it’s quick and very easy. For those of us that are more geekishly inclined, we like to do things through the Terminal. This tutorial will show … Read More
The quickest way to set your IP address from the command line is to use the versatile and powerful ipconfig utility, which is bundled directly with Mac OS X. We’ll show you how to set an IP address with ipconfig by retrieving one from a DHCP server, and also demonstrate how to set a specific … Read More
Anytime that you run a command through the Terminal directly by a command name like ls or dscacheutil, your Mac is looking through a series of directories for that command to exist. This list of directories is called the PATH, and it’s a carry over from the unix underpinnings of Mac OS X. As you … Read More
By pasting the following small function into your .profile, you’ll be able to print random tweets from any Twitter feed:
