The “man” command is short for manual, and with it you can summon detailed manual page and information on nearly any other command or command line utility that is available, including using an extensive man document search to find related manual pages. While man pages are frequently used and referenced, many users don’t know how … Read More
Some more advanced Mac troubleshooting and diagnostics techniques require a user to access the Terminal from Mac OS Recovery Mode. We’ll show you how to quickly access the command line while a Mac is booted into Recovery Mode.
Command line users may find it helpful to change and rename the file extension of a group of files in a directory. For example, let’s say you have a batch of files with the file extension “.txt” but you want all of those the file extensions to be “.py” instead. That’s what we’re going to … Read More
Need to know what version of Gatekeeper and Xprotect are installed on a Mac? You can find this information through the command line of Mac OS. GateKeeper, MRT (Malware Removal Tool), and XProtect are all built-in features of Mac OS designed to prevent malware threats and other nefarious software from being installed or used on … Read More
Did you know the Mac has a native SSH client built directly into the command line? This ssh client allows for secured connections and remote logins into other machines. Unlike Windows, you won’t need a third party app to utilize SSH for connections into remote computers and devices, because ssh is built directly into Mac … Read More
Want to see the size of a directory from the command line? You may have noticed that using the traditional ls command to list the contents of a a directory won’t necessarily show the total size of a directory. Instead, to see what the disk usage is for a specific directory you’ll want to use … Read More
Mac OS users who have modified their DNS settings may need to clear their DNS cache before the changes take effect. Additionally, sometimes name servers and domains may not resolve as intended if you have stale DNS cache on the Mac, another situation where resetting DNS cache can often be the solution. We’ll show you … Read More
Some of the more privacy conscious Mac users out there might put tape over their webcam or use apps like Oversight to detect camera activity. While either of those approaches can be satisfactory for many users (or considered totally paranoid and overboard to others), many advanced Mac users in the security community go a step … Read More
Using Filevault on a Mac encrypts the entire hard drive and helps protect personal data from theft or unauthorized snooping. It’s a great security feature that many users enable when they’re first setting up their Mac, but some users may enable it or disable it later as well. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but … Read More
Have you ever wanted to know what every single possible terminal command was on a Mac? You can list every terminal command available by turning to the command line. What you’ll see is a significant list of terminal commands with over 1400 possible commands to investigate and use, many of which are either helpful or … Read More
The ‘ls’ command lists all files and folders in a directory at the command line, but by default ls returns a list in alphabetical order. With a simple command flag, you can have ls sort by date instead, showing the most recently modified items at the top of the ls command results. This trick applies … Read More
Curl is the powerful command line utility that allows you to transfer data to or from a server or URL. One common function used by developers is to make a POST request with curl, which is what we’re going to cover here.
Many developers and pro users rely on MySQL for their database needs. We’ll walk through how to export or dump all databases from MySQL, dump a single database, and also show how to import all of those databases from a database.sql file back into MySQL. While there are GUI based tools to interact with MySQL, … Read More
Command line users rely on the ‘kill’ command to terminate a process as defined by the appropriate process identifier (PID). While there’s nothing wrong with targeting processes by their PID, another approach which is often easier is to target a process by name, rather than its unique identifier. There are a few ways to kill … Read More
Users can securely download a file from any remote server with SSH by using the scp tool at the command line. Essentially this means you can have a file stored securely on a remote server and transfer it to local storage without having to expose that file to the outside world, because scp offers the … Read More
If you need to view the IP addresses of other hardware on the same LAN (Local Area Network) as a Mac, the command line arp tool works quite well. You’ll quickly find other devices IP and accompanying MAC addresses, which can make direct network connections easier and be helpful for many other network and troubleshooting … Read More
Mac systems administrators may find a need to convert an existing regular user account into an administrator account on a Mac. While most Mac users would be best served by converting account status to admin through the Users & Groups preference panel, advanced users can perform the same function through the Terminal by using the … Read More
Mac users who come from a unix background may appreciate knowing how to implement the equivalent to the Unix “tree” command in macOS and Mac OS X. There are actually a few different ways to show a folder tree in the Terminal of Mac OS X, we’ll cover an easy tree equivalent achieved through an … Read More
