Ever wanted to create an iPhone or Android ringtone from an existing audio file, but wanted to complete the process entirely from the command line? You’re in luck, because Mac OS X has a little audio conversion tool that can turn any existing audio track into an Android or iPhone compatible ringtone in seconds. We’ll … Read More
The powerful curl command line tool can be used to download files from just about any remote server. Longtime command line users know this can be useful for a wide variety of situations, but to keep things simple, many will find that downloading a file with curl can often be a quicker alternative to using … Read More
Mac users who prefer to have a more traditional Unix toolkit accessible to them through the Terminal may wish to install the optional Command Line Tools subsection of the Xcode IDE. From MacOS Monterey, Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, OS X El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks onward, this is now easily possible directly and … Read More
Advanced users may need to add a user account to the sudoers file, which allows that user to run certain commands with root privileges. To greatly simplify what that means, these newly privileged user accounts will then be able to execute commands without getting permission denied errors or having to prefix a terminal command with … Read More
The Disk Utility app bundled with Mac OS X has a command line equivalent which offers advanced users the ability to perform disk maintenance from the terminal, including disk verification and repairs. This allows for a variety of helpful troubleshooting abilities, including the possibility to remotely issue disk repairs though SSH, or through Single User … Read More
Do you have your terminal windows arranged in a particular way, perhaps running particular processes, that you want to consistently resume to without having to rearrange and relaunch things? Rather than relying entirely on the OS X Resume feature, you should use the Terminal app “Window Groups” tool, which lets you save not only the … Read More
Tis the season for some winter fun and holiday magic… in your Mac OS X Terminal with some digital snow fall! This nifty not-so-little ruby command string will make it snow in the command line of your Mac, there isn’t much to get it snowing beyond a simple copy and paste, but for best results … Read More
FileVault is a security feature that offers full disk encryption for Macs. Identifying Macs that are using FileVault is fairly easy in person for machines that have a logged in user account, all you have to do is check System Preferences to see if has been enabled or not. But what if you the Mac … Read More
It’s easy to create a password protected text file by using the command line text editor ‘vi’. This is infinitely useful for privacy purposes, whether the protected file is for containing login details, various passwords, personal information, a private journal, or just about anything else that you want stored securely in a single password protected … Read More
We’re all incredibly reliant on our internet connections these days, but sometimes those connections aren’t so reliable. Whether it’s due to an ISP failure, a router being down, someone tripping over a cord somewhere, or whatever other occurrence, it can be frustrating to wait for a downed internet connection to come alive again. We’ve all … Read More
Many advanced users prefer to use firmware files when updating their iOS devices to the latest version, and every time an iOS update comes out we post direct download links for the latest versions. Every once in a while we get questions from users who wonder how we find those file links, since they’re tucked … Read More
Many Mac users running OS X Yosemite and OS X Mavericks have noticed the purge command, which forces memory cache to be emptied as if it a computer was rebooted, throws an error when attempting to run through Terminal in OS X 10.9 or newer. In most cases that error message is “Unable to purge … Read More
Just about every web developer or designer is familiar with Google Chrome’s Developer Tools, which allows for easy browser based debugging, tweaking, and adjusting of web pages and web applications. Those who live in web browsers and text editors know just how useful DevTools is, and with the help of a third party Chrome extension … Read More
Getting comfortable with the command line is often just a matter of learning a few command tricks and finding uses for them, and we’re going to offer six handy tricks that you’re almost certain to find some use out of regardless of your skill level in the Terminal. Read on, you’ll be downloading files, using … Read More
One of the most commonly used command line tools is ‘cd’, which stands for change directory, and as you probably know is used to navigate directories and switch between one folder or another within the file system. For those just learning and starting to familiarize themselves with the Terminal and command line, here are five … Read More
Mac OS X has always been able to read NTFS drives, but tucked away in Mac OS X is a hidden option to enable write support to drives formatted as NTFS (NTFS stands for New Technology File System and is a proprietary file system format for Microsoft Windows). Enabling NTFS write support on the Mac … Read More
A handy terminal command will show a list of all apps installed on a Mac that have come exclusively from the Mac App Store. This can be helpful for a variety of reasons, like when building a list of apps you may want to replace from outside the official App Store channels if you’re migrating … Read More
With the help of a simple command line function, you can quickly initiate a web search in your GUI web browser of choice right from the Terminal app. We’ll cover a few examples, demonstrating searching the web with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, and using a variety of different web browsers, including Chrome, Safari, and … Read More
