The most straight forward way to burn an ISO from a Mac is using Disk Utility, but you can also burn ISO’s and disk images directly from the command line with the help of a tool called ‘dd’. This works for Mac OS X and Linux, but we’re going to be focusing on the Mac … Read More
A MAC address is a unique identification number assigned to network interfaces, these can be attached to physical hardware like NIC and Wi-Fi cards or assigned to virtual machines. On some occasions, you’ll need to change a MAC address to another ID. We’ve received a few questions about this recently because the process of changing … Read More
A long hidden airport command line utility buried deep in Mac OS X can be used to scan for and find available wireless networks. This powerful tool is very helpful for network admins and systems administrators, but it’s handy for the average user to help discover nearby wi-fi routers as well.
We recently covered 12 keyboard shortcuts to help navigate around and manipulate text in Mac OS X, and now we’ll show you a handful of similar tricks for use at the command line. These shortcuts can be used just about anywhere in the Terminal, including the bash prompt.
We recently covered the classic method of adding colors to the command line by editing .bash_profile, but it turns out that Terminal in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion both support custom ANSI colors, giving the ability to easily change the ansi color scheme through external theme files. One such color scheme is … Read More
Adding colorized ls output to the Terminal in Mac OS X is a good way to make navigating around the command line a bit easier on the eyes. This makes different items show up in different colors, including directories, files, executables, and symbolic links.
SHA hashing is frequently used with distribution control systems to determine revisions and to check data integrity by detecting file corruption or tampering. For common usage, a SHA checksum provides a string that can be used to verify a file been transferred as intended. If SHA checksums match, the files integrity has been maintained. This … Read More
The default behavior for most command line tools is to show sizes in bytes, for tiny text files that is fine but when you start working with larger items this becomes difficult to read and interpret. The solutions is fairly simple, pass a “human readable” flag with the command, which will convert bytes to a … Read More
Modern versions of Mac OS X include a great tool called tmutil that lets you interact with with Time Machine from the command line. It’s a powerful utility that has a ton of options, and we’ve used it before to disable local snapshots, but for the purposes here we are going to use tmutil to … Read More
You can monitor disk activity in Mac OS X by using the Activity Monitor app or several command line tools. Activity Monitor is the easiest and most user friendly, but the Terminal options allow further information to be retrieved.
Using the lsof command, we can find out exactly what process or application is using a specified file at that given moment. This is similar to the opensnoop command, but rather than watching the changes to a file over time, lsof can give us a snapshot of this very moment, which can be helpful for … Read More
Advanced Mac OS X users may find it useful to know that KEXT (kernel extensions) can be manually installed. The process of installing kexts manually into OS X is not too difficult if you’re comfortable with the command line, but it is a multi-step process of copying the appropriate .kext file to the appropriate kernel … Read More
Creating a password protected zip file is easy in Mac OS X and does not require any add-ons or downloads. Instead, use the zip utility that is bundled with all Macs. This offers a simple way to protect a zip archive file from unwanted viewing access, as when a user attempts to decompress the contents … Read More
The Mac OS X Terminal includes a great feature that lets you quickly access new manual pages from any existing Terminal window.
Go2Shell is a free Finder toolbar add-on that creates a new Terminal window from the current directory of any desktop folder in Mac OS X with a click of a button. This is similar to the services option that can be added to the right-click contextual menu, but Go2Shell is faster due to resting in … Read More
A helpful command line tool called hdiutil is included in Mac OS X that allows disk image files (.dmg extension) to be mounted directly from the Terminal, without the need of using the GUI. Using hdiutil for such a task is helpful for scripting or remote connections through SSH.
Completely disabling and reenabling Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Mavericks can be done with the help of the Terminal. The following command unloads the Spotlight mds agent from launchd, thereby preventing the daemon from running or indexing any drives entirely. Open up the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) … Read More
If you shuffle between the Terminal and the Mac OS X desktop often, you’ll get good use out of a Services feature which gives the ability to create a new Terminal window (or tab) from a selected folder within the Finder. You have to enable the Service inside System Prefs beforehand though:
