One of the more interesting little known Dock modifications on the Mac is the ability to make hidden app icons appear as translucent and muted in the Dock to indicate their hidden status. If you look carefully at the screenshots of the Mac Dock in this article you’ll see the effect, as some of the … Read More
When you launch a new Terminal window or tab in Mac OS X (and most linux distributions) you’ll be greeted with a little message, either some “last login” details, or maybe even a message from the admin from /etc/motd. The last login details are default in a new Mac OS X terminal session, whereas the … Read More
I use screenshots constantly to share bits of information with people, and they can be really helpful when troubleshooting as well. Here’s all you’ll need to know about taking screenshots in Mac OS X, from capturing the screen in Mac OS X Finder and within applications, to changing the default screenshot file type, to taking … Read More
Single Application Mode is an interesting feature of MacOS and Mac OS X that is often misunderstood, we’ll discuss what the feature is, how it works, and how to enable it on your Mac running nearly any version of Mac OS still in use, whether that’s macOS 12, 11, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, or newer.
Finding the numerical IP address of a website or domain URL is pretty easy. We’ll use a terminal utility called nslookup, the command can be used to discover whatever domain resolves to a specific IP. This works for Macs with OS X but also in other unix varieties and even Windows DOS prompt too.
The networksetup utility allows you to join any available network, whether or not it is a router connected through Ethernet, a wi-fi router that is or is not broadcasting an SSID, and whether or not it has any password encryption required. Since most networking is done with wireless communications these days, we’ll focus on joining … Read More
Brian asks: “I need to add line numbers to a text file. I don’t mean line numbers in the text editor, I mean adding a number next to each item inside a text file. Is this possible to automate or do I have to manually edit the file typing 1, 2, 3 and going insane?” … Read More
Want to re-run the last executed command? Or what about re-running the last used command but running it as root? You can do both! Ever typed a nice fancy string command into the terminal and been frustrated to discover that you need to run it all over again? Or perhaps you discovered that the aforementioned … Read More
If you want to discover the last time a specific command was used without actually executing it, follow this format at the command line: !sudo:p The above example will print back the last usage of the ‘sudo’ command without actually executing it, which is very useful in some situations (like the situation below, where the … Read More
Want to quickly share a file, test some code, or broadcast something? You can instantly create a web server out of the current directory by using nothing but python, yup, no apache, no nginx, no litespeed, all python, which ships with pretty much every unix variation these days. The command is remarkably simple considering how … Read More
The Mac OS X Terminal can become slow to launch over time, but there’s an easy solution to speed it up again. By deleting the Apple System Logs, you can shave the lag in opening and launching new Terminal windows/tabs dramatically, in my case from about a three second delay to instantaneous! Here’s how to … Read More
Ping is an essential utility for network administrators, but it’s also pretty handy to check if websites are online, how your internet connection is working, if you are experiencing lag or packet loss on a network connection, or to determine if a network resource is available. Mac users can access and use ping to target … Read More
You can quickly post a tweet from the command line using the curl command, all you’ll need is your Twitter username and password.
TTYtter is a rather fun command line based Twitter client. Written in Perl, it’s got all the essential ingredients needed for basic Twitter needs without ever leaving a Terminal window. Running TTYtter is easy enough, it just needs your login information and off it goes. You can either run it through perl with: perl /path/to/ttytter.pl … Read More
If you’re a developer (or anyone else) you may quickly get fed up with the Crash Reporter Dialogue box that pops up when an app melts down and crashes in Mac OS X. If you’re pestered by the crash reporter dialog window, then you can quickly turn the window on and off with a defaults … Read More
It’s easy to accidentally change directories to something you weren’t intending to (say, accidentally hitting cd and returning home, thus losing your place in a complicated directory structure seep in the file system somewhere), but thankfully there’s a command that will immediately take you back to the previous directory, regardless of what it was. The … Read More
Using the command line tool ‘opensnoop’ you can track any Mac applications (or system process) usage of the file system. This is a very handy tool for administrators and troubleshooting! The simplest way to use it is as follows:
Need a therapy session? Your Mac has you covered. Yes, you read that right. You can use your Mac as a psychotherapist from the Terminal, thanks to emacs the text editor. Say what? If you’re confused don’t be, it’s an easter egg that has long existed and it’s easy to access.
