Time Machine backups can be triggered remotely thanks to SSH (Remote Login) and the command line. This is an excellent solution to use if you left the home or office without making an important backup, though the SSH requirement does add a potential layer of complexity that may make it more appropriate for advanced users. … Read More
If you’re a Mac owner you know that every time the Mac reboots or starts up it makes a startup chime sound. Though you can temporarily mute the chime by holding down the Mute key on any Mac keyboard, you can also choose to disable it completely by turning to the command line. To be … Read More
The history command is a useful way to find specific commands that have been used in the past, and it can also be used to discover what your personal most used commands are with the following command string: history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head -15 The … Read More
Searching the file system for a specific document or file is easy and very fast. Though most users are best served using Spotlight from the menubar, there are times when either Spotlight isn’t working, you need more paramaters, you’re working in the Terminal, operating with a remote machine, or perhaps just would like to use … Read More
For anyone who uses the command line regularly, a new tool called pkill makes killing processes significantly easier in modern releases of Mac OS and Mac OS X. Improving on the standard kill command, pkill easily supports wildcards, making it easy to terminate all processes belonging to a match or even a specific user.
Saving a complete listing of files contained with a folder is easy, and there are two quick ways to save that list as a text file. Save a List of Files from Finder The first approach may be easiest for most users and is done through the OS X Finder and TextEdit app, it’s a … Read More
Most Mac OS X preferences are managed through easily accessible control panels, but going behind the scenes with defaults write commands can lead to some genuinely useful tweaks that can only be made through the command line. This list represents a compilation of some of the best defaults write commands out there, and even if … Read More
Bored? Launch Terminal and get ready for some completely stupid tricks to keep yourself entertained. You’ll be listening to Horse Ebooks blab away, watching Star Wars in ASCII, playing retro games, toasting your CPU cores with a repetitive phrase, and even talking to a virtual psychotherapist. The hidden joys of the command line are upon … Read More
Using the command line softwareupdate tool you can update Mac OS X system software without using the App Store. This is particularly useful for Mac users running later versions of Mac OS X where the software update system is primarily handled through the Mac App Store, but can occasionally either go awry or be inaccessible … Read More
OS X Mavericks comes with PHP 5.4.30, and OS X Mountain Lion ships with PHP 5.3.13 preinstalled, though if you start the built-in Apache server, you will find PHP isn’t enabled by default. Changing this is easy, and if you’re a web developer and want PHP running on your local Mac with OS X 10.8 … Read More
Rebooting a Mac from the command line is fairly simple, though it should be pointed out that most Mac OS X users are best served just using the standard Apple menu method to issue a system restart. Nonetheless, for advanced Mac users, using the terminal reboot command can be an invaluable trick for troubleshooting … Read More
The Sharing preference panel options were changed a bit in OS X Mountain Lion and again in Mavericks, and while things like Internet Sharing remain, the Web Sharing preference panel was removed. The Apache web server remains bundled with Mac OS X though, but you’ll need to turn to the command line to enable the … Read More
Do you want to change how often Mac OS checks for available software updates? It’s possible to adjust the Mac software update frequency with a little effort. Mac OS X now automatically checks for software updates, and a notification pops up if you have updates available. But unlike older versions of Mac OS X, there … Read More
Need to edit or modify the hosts file on a Mac? This guide will show you exactly how to edit the hosts file in Mac OS. You’ll find hosts in Mac OS X is stored at /private/etc/hosts but it can also be accessed at the more traditional location of /etc/hosts. That said, if you’re looking … Read More
Using an excellent third party tool called terminal-notifier, you can post alerts and messages to Notification Center directly from the command line. This has a myriad of potentially valid uses, but one fantastic use-case is along the same veins of verbally announcing when a command has completed or sending a badge alert, but instead posting … Read More
You’ve always been able to temporarily prevent a Mac from sleeping by using the pmset noidle command or a hot corner, but with modern versions of Mac OS X, Apple has bundled a command line tool dedicated to sleep prevention much like the popular Caffeine app, and appropriately, named it caffeinate. At it’s most simple … Read More
Tab completion is a wonderful feature of shells that make power users lives easier, letting you automatically complete commands, paths, file names, and a variety of other things entered into the command line. It works great as is but you can make it even better by enabling a few features; ignore caps lock and casing … Read More
If you need to use Java, installing the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in OS X Mountain Lion is necessary even if you had Java previously installed in OS X Lion or Snow Leopard and just performed an upgrade to 10.8. That’s because Mountain Lion uninstalls Java during the upgrade process, this is to insure the … Read More
