The vast majority of Mac users won’t need to manually tweak launchd and launchctl, but there are times when you uninstall or stop using an app in Mac OS X and a service agent continues to needlessly load in launchd. This is annoying, but these rogue agents are easy to remove via the command line, … Read More
Want to change the crontab editor on the Mac? You can do that! We’ll show you how to use a different crontab editor on a selective per-edit basis, and also how to change the default crontab text editor. You can use vi, emacs, nano, or whatever else you’d like. Most hardcore command line users and … Read More
You can instantly print any Finder items full path and name into the Terminal by dragging and dropping an item from a Finder window and into a Terminal window. Once the Finder item has been dropped into the terminal, the entire path to the item is automatically typed out instantaneously, maintaining both proper capitalization as … Read More
If you’re trying to remember an exact command you executed via the Terminal but can’t quite come up with it, you can query your command line history to discover old commands that have been run or executed in the past. This trick to find and retrieve prior commands executed in the command line works on … Read More
The Mac just had it’s birthday, but don’t you long for the days before a GUI? Don’t you wish you were in the 70’s or 80’s banging away at a DOS prompt connecting to a local BBS? Do you get nostalgic for the days of typing commands into a noisy green on black terminal that … Read More
By default, anytime you take a screen capture in Mac OS X, the resulting screenshot file will save to the current users desktop. This makes retrieval very easy and is very appropriate for the average Mac user, but for those who take a lot of screen shots in Mac OS, they may find their desktop … Read More
Want to update Mac OS software from the Terminal? You can check for available updates, ignore packages, and install any or all Mac OS X Software Updates directly from the command line. To see what updates are available for a Mac, or to install a software update from the Terminal of Mac OS X, amongst … Read More
The Mac App Store includes a hidden Debug menu that can be enabled with a simple defaults write command. The menu includes a variety of interesting options and tweaks that are clearly intended for internal development purposes.
If you’ve ever accidentally used cat on a binary file, you’ll have seen the gibberish that results and how it can totally screw up your Terminal window with loads of weird characters. Of course there are many other ways to bork up your command line prompt which seems to become unrecoverable through the typical clear … Read More
One of my complaints with the default Mac OS X Terminal app is that you can’t split the Terminal screen, instead you have to open two windows. Well, this must have annoyed some other developers too because iTerm2 aims to address this problem. iTerm2 is a fork of the original iTerm project for Mac OS … Read More
You don’t need to use iTunes to play music on your Mac, particularly if you just want to play an audio document. Mac OS X comes with an included command line audio player that you can use to play most audio files with. In this example we’re going to use an MP3 file as the … Read More
Knowing your Mac’s IP address is important for setting up a network or sharing files, here’s two different ways to find your IP address in Mac OS X; an easy way through the GUI and a more technical approach with the command line. These methods will be the same whether you are connected via ethernet … Read More
Do you want to generate a random MAC address? That’s no problem with this neat openssl tip sent in by one of our readers, and you can run the command once or multiple times to generate a randomized MAC address instantly on each execution. This command will work to randomize MAC addresses in in Mac … Read More
Here’s a nice trick if you need to continuously observe your Macs system usage, including disk usage, CPU, and load average. The great thing about this iostat trick is that it updates constantly, allowing for realtime monitoring of system performance, which can be extremely helpful for performance testing and tracking down various processes or activities … Read More
Want to know how fast a Mac is? You can check a Macs processor clock speed, chip type, and CPU architecture a few different ways, but we’ll cover two quick methods to determine the clock speed of a given Mac. First, a super easy glance at processor speed through the GUI, and second, a more … Read More
The fastest way to get MP3 and m4a file info out of Mac OS X is using the Terminal and afinfo command. The command line tool you’ll want to use stands for Audio File Info, rather appropriately. You can try it out yourself with any audio file, though for the purposes here we’re looking at … Read More
What’s your machines record uptime? Uptime is the amount of days since the last reboot or boot up, and this can vary widely per user and per computer. I have an old MacBook that I use as a server of sorts, and as a third screen when working from home. I realized I hadn’t rebooted … Read More
If you’ve used a tool like DaisyDisk to analyze your Mac’s disk space usage, you may have come across a file named ‘sleepimage’ that is rather large. What is sleepimage in Mac OS X? The ‘sleepimage’ file is just what it sounds like, it’s what your Mac had in it’s memory when the machine went … Read More
