Setting up passwordless SSH logins is a great way to speed up connections to regularly accessed remote Macs and unix boxes. Because not all versions of Mac OS X include the ssh-copy-id command, you may have to use cat or scp to copy over your ssh key. This is how to set everything up, it … Read More
Want to have wget on Mac without Homebrew or MacPorts for whatever reason? You can do that by building wget from source at the command line. The command line tool wget lets you retrieve a group of files from FTP and HTTP protocols, it’s a very useful utility for web developers and powerusers to have … Read More
Platypus is an excellent utility that lets you turn virtually any script into a self-contained Mac OS X application. Free and remarkably simple to use, Platypus will support just about any shell script, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, AppleScript, Expect, and even other scripting languages.
Troubleshooting computer problems is never particularly fun, and with so many potential third party add-ons, plugins, extensions, scripts, and whatever else is buried into OS X, how are you supposed to find everything to help determine what’s causing an issue? You need Consultant’s Canary, because whether you’re troubleshooting your own Mac or someone else’s, it’s … Read More
A recent tip covered how to announce when a command line task finished by using OS X’s text-to-speech abilities. The obvious downside to that method is the sound makes it less useful to those who are using Macs in quiet environments like offices, schools, or libraries. An alternate solution is to use growlnotify to create … Read More
Along the lines of vocally announcing task completion within the command line, you can also have Mac OS X speak the output of any executed command.
By appending the say command to the end of another command, Mac OS X will vocally announce when the initial task has finished running successfully. For example, to have OS X announce that a particular script has finished running the command could be: python backup.py && say “jobs done” The important part is the “&& … Read More
If you’re working at the command line and need to quickly empty the contents of a file, you can do so by throwing a greater than symbol and a space in front of the filename in question.
We’ve shown you how to generate MAC addresses randomly and then how to go about changing a MAC address in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, but why have those be two separate actions? Using the command line, you can combine the two events into a single action to generate a valid MAC … Read More
Whenever a new Terminal window is launched, a variety of system logs are read to provide information on the last login. One way to speed up launching a new terminal window is to delete those .asl log files, but you can achieve a substantial speed boost by simply setting Terminal to open a shell rather … Read More
Mac OS X has fairly good memory management but it’s not perfect, and sometimes RAM can be held unnecessarily in the “inactive” state despite the contents no longer being needed. If you’ve been participating in memory heavy activities or you just need to free up some available RAM you can actually force Mac OS X … Read More
A users .bash_history file keeps a running tab of command line history, logging every command that has been entered into the bash prompt. These command history files make it very easy to find and recall past commands that may have been forgotten, and they’re also extremely useful for system administration. We will cover how to … Read More
You’re probably familiar with making your own zip files if you’ve ever needed to transfer a group of files or if you’re managing your own backups outside of Time Machine. Using the GUI zip tools are easy and user friendly, but if you want some more advanced options with better compression you can turn to … Read More
With the help of a buried menu item, we can lock the Mac OS X screen right from the Terminal. This does not log a user out, it just brings up the standard Mac OS X lock screen and login window, requiring a valid user and password before the Mac can be used again. This … Read More
If you need to quickly retrieve the IP address of the router you are connected to or through, you can find this information immediately in the Terminal of Mac OS X.
Tired of bash? Prefer zsh, ksh, tcsh, fish, or sh? You can quickly change the default shell in Terminal app, in addition to changing a users default login shell for when logging in remotely with SSH or otherwise. Here’s how to do both.
You can create ISO images from any source disk or data by using the command line in Mac OS X. This isn’t too different than burning them through Terminal, and you can use either the hdiutil tool or dd command. While the command line is generally reserved for advanced users, using it to create ISO’s … Read More
Ever been away from your Mac and wished you could put it to sleep remotely? Maybe you accidentally left a Mac on at home or at work, or maybe you just left a Mac running so a download could complete. You don’t have to leave it running while you’re gone though, here are two different … Read More
