Some advanced users may wish to create an ISO file of the macOS Big Sur installer file (or MacOS Catalina installer, or MacOS Mojave installers for that matter). These can be useful for installing MacOS into virtual machines like VirtualBox and VMWare, and because the resulting installer is an ISO file it can be helpful … Read More
If you’re one of the early adopters who acquired an M1 Apple Silicon Mac and find that Homebrew and many other x86 terminal apps don’t yet have support for the new Arm architecture, you’ll be happy to know there’s a fairly simple workaround. The trick is to run a parallel Terminal application through Rosetta. And … Read More
Ever wished you could see the transfer progress and speed of copying files at the command line? If you’re familiar with the command line of Mac OS, Linux, or any other Unix operating system, you likely use the ‘cp’ or ditto commands to copy files, directories, and other data. The ditto and cp command is … Read More
Advanced Mac users often want to make a boot disk installer for macOS Big Sur beta, allowing for something like a USB flash drive to be used to boot and install macOS Big Sur onto any compatible Mac. Bootable MacOS installer USB drives provide for the ability to clean install macOS Big Sur, update to … Read More
Advanced Mac users may wish to convert a MacOS Installer application into an ISO file. Typically the resulting installer ISO files are used for installing macOS into virtual machines like VMWare or VirtualBox, but they can also be used to burn the ISO to media to create a boot disk. This offers an alternative to … Read More
Some Mac users may wish to create a bootable MacOS Catalina installer drive, typically using a USB flash drive or with another similar small boot disk. Bootable USB installers offer an easy way to upgrade multiple Macs to macOS Catalina, to perform clean installs of MacOS Catalina, to perform maintenance from a boot disk like … Read More
Need to quickly see a list of all cron jobs on a computer? You can easily see all scheduled cron jobs by using the crontab command, and seeing cron data works the same on Mac as well as Linux and most other unix environments too. Perhaps you have a script or task running and you’re … Read More
Want to re-enable the startup boot chime sound effect on a new Mac? You can do that with a command line string entered into the Macs Terminal. As you may know, new Macs default to not making a startup boot chime sound effect, this is in contrast to every prior Mac model which included a … Read More
Some advanced Mac users may have noticed that certain shell scripts with cron, cron jobs, and crontab are either not working at all, or not able to function properly in the newest versions of MacOS, notably Mojave 10.14, Catalina 10.15, macOS Big Sur 11, and later. Depending on the situation, this may be accompanied by … Read More
Mac users can download full complete MacOS installers directly from the command line. This is an incredibly useful feature particularly if you want to build USB boot drive installers, you manage multiple Macs, or you simply want to have full access to a complete installer application of MacOS for any other purpose. With this particular … Read More
Want to change the screen brightness on Mac from the command line? You can use the Terminal to adjust screen brightness to be brighter or dimmer with a few different methods, as we’ll demonstrate here. First we’ll show you a handy way to increase or decrease Mac screen brightness using osascript at the command line, … Read More
Rarely, you may attempt to unzip a zip archive and come across an error that states “End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on the last disk(s) of this … Read More
Using SSH, or Secure Shell, is a very common way to establish remote connections to Mac and Linux machines from the command line. If you’re a systems administrator, or if you have SSH enabled on a Mac for another reason, you may eventually need to log off another users ssh connection. There are several ways … Read More
Advanced Mac users who are interested in the world of Information Security (InfoSec) can easily test out ParrotSec Linux in live boot mode by using a virtual machine. In this particular walkthrough, we’ll show you how to quickly get ParrotSec running in live mode within the free Parallels Desktop Lite app, but if you want … Read More
Want to run a simple web server off of an iPad or iPhone? If you have iSH linux shell running in iOS then you can easily start and run a simple web server directly from an iPhone or iPad. By running iSH and starting a web server with python 3 you can then serve either … Read More
Zsh, or z shell, is a popular shell alternative to bash and tcsh, complete with many improvements and customization options offered through the Oh-My-ZSH project. If you’d like to use zsh as the default shell in Terminal for Mac OS rather than bash, you can do so rather easily with taking the following steps:
Have you ever wished you had a Linux command line on an iPad or iPhone? With iSH you can get pretty close to accomplishing that goal. iSH Shell is a Linux shell for iOS that uses an x86 emulator to run a simplified version of Alpine Linux on an iPad or iPhone. You can even … Read More
Advanced Mac users can boot into Single User Mode, which loads directly into the command line of Mac OS and skips the familiar friendly user interface. Booting into Single User Mode on a Mac can be helpful for some troubleshooting purposes and administrative tasks, but is generally best reserved for use by advanced Mac users … Read More
