Sometimes you need to enter a password into the terminal, usually for sudo or su commands, which lets users execute a command with super user privileges. This is fairly typical for allowing access to read or modify something that would otherwise not be possible with a standard user account. You’ll commonly see sudo prefixing another … Read More
Mac users can adjust the idle time to sleep their computers easily through the Energy Saver preference panel, but many advanced Mac OS X users may wish to turn to the command line to perform such a task. This allows for scripting, remote checking and changing idle sleep behavior through SSH, and you can also … Read More
The default text size used by Terminal app in OS X can be quite small if you’re using a large resolution display. While you can change the font to be better suit your preferences, and increasing the line spacing helps reading too, another simple solution to boost readability is to simply increase the text size … Read More
In some unusual and admittedly rare situations, fonts in OS X and various Mac apps may display erroneously, or outright fail to display. Typically this happens after a font has been modified or a font has been installed outside of the standard ~/Library/Fonts directory, but it can happen out of the blue in some situations … Read More
When you hit the green maximize button to resize windows on a Mac or send things into full screen mode, a fancy visual animation shows the redrawing of the window size as the active window expands outwards. While this looks great and many users will be happy with the default resizing animation time in OS … Read More
If you’re a Mac user who finds the text output shown within Terminal app to be a bit too confined and tightly spaced, you’ll be pleased to discover that you can adjust the line spacing to accommodate your preferences. You can boost line spacing within Terminal dramatically or just a little bit (or if you … Read More
Spelling autocorrect features tend to be divisive, with Mac users usually either loving it or hating it. Most Mac users know they can easily turn off autocorrect through an OS X system preference change, but the System Preferences are only accessible from the graphical interface of a Mac. If you’re wanting to automate the enabling … Read More
Many command line users are familiar with the ‘man’ command that will open a manual page for a specific command, but what if rather than a specific commands man page, you’re looking for a string match within all man pages? That’s what this tricks is for, so whether you’re trying to learn more about a … Read More
Many developers require MySQL on their Macs, but if you’ve tried to install MySQL in OS X El Capitan and Yosemite, you likely noticed that you’ll get an “installation failed” error during the process. That error sounds worse than it is, because you can avoid it entirely by choosing not to install the startup item … Read More
Some Mac users may encounter situations where they need to flush DNS cache in OS X for a name server to resolve properly, or for some DNS address change to become noticed by their individual computer. This is particularly relevant for system administrators, network admins, and web developers, but there are certainly situations where other … Read More
Apple has released an important security update for Mac users, labeled as OS X Bash Update 1.0. The update addresses a recently discovered critical security flaw known as “Shellshock” that impacts the bash shell, the default shell used by the Terminal app of OS X, and is recommended for all users to install even if … Read More
Quitting apps gracefully is typically done through the appropriate application menu by choosing “Quit”, but the Mac GUI is obviously inaccessible from the command line of Mac OS X. So when most command line users are confronted with the need to exit an application, they wind up using the ‘kill’ command to terminate the process … Read More
Troubleshooting complex issues on a Mac can be challenging as is, and if you’re ever confronted with some complex situations you may find the command line to lend a major hand. In this case, advanced users can boot a Mac into safe mode through the usage of the nvram utility, a tool which allows users … Read More
The networksetup utility offers a command line interface to configuring the variety of Mac networking features available in Mac OS X. We’ve discussed networksetup and accompanying features many times here for more advanced purposes, but one of the simpler uses of networksetup is that it can list out every piece of networking hardware attached to … Read More
Typically Mac users will retrieve the screen resolution of connected displays through the Displays system preference panel in OS X. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that approach, it’s easy and quick, but because it uses the graphical interface of OS X it’s not necessary helpful for scripting purposes or remote management through Remote Login and … Read More
The user path is the series of directories that command line programs are searched in order to run. For example, if you type ‘iostat’ into the terminal, then iostat will be run from /usr/sbin because “/usr/sbin” is part of your $PATH. Accordingly, users who frequently use the command line may need to adjust or add … Read More
Most apps in Mac OS X can be uninstalled easily by dragging them into the Trash from the /Applications/ folder, and many others come with accompanying uninstall applications that will clean house and completely remove the apps too. Additionally, there are third party utilities for Mac OS that can make total removal of apps as … Read More
Mac users who are dealing with particularly complex or troublesome issues with Mac OS can turn to an advanced diagnostics tool available from the command line in Mac OS X. The tool, called sysdiagnose, offers detailed technical analysis and reports of a huge variety of components of OS X and the Mac hardware, making it … Read More
