25 Terminal Tips Every Mac User Should Know

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25 Terminal Tips Every Mac User Should Know

Posted 12/11/2008 at 12:40:29pm | by Johnathon Williams

One of the reasons we use Macs is how self-sufficient OS X tends to be. Most of the time, system maintenance occurs in the background, and mundane tasks that do require user participation (backups, for instance) are made as painless as possible (thank you, Time Machine.) For those times when we want or need more system-level control, these are the Terminal commands to rely on.

22. Backup In A Snap

Screen shot of terminal line code
Rsync has far too many options to mention. Execute man rsync for the full list.

In any article about the Terminal, federal law requires us to mention rsync, the only backup utility you really need. Rsync can create full bootable backups of your entire hard drive or any combination of folders. On subsequent backups, it’s smart enough to copy only those files that have changed, saving a lot of time. Indeed, rsync is so powerful and flexible that many graphical backup utilities are little more than shiny wrappers that call rsync in the background.

To back up your entire Home folder, execute rsync -auE --progress ~ /Volumes/name-of-drive/name-of-backup-folder.

Replace the placeholders after the last two slashes with the name of your drive and backup folder, respectively. To back up your entire startup drive, run sudo rsync -auE --progress / /Volumes/name-of-drive/name-of-backup-folder.

23. Identify And Eliminate A Memory Hog

screen shot of terminal line code
Take out your aggression on misbehaving processes with the kill command.

When sluggish performance slows your desktop to a crawl, a runaway application might be the culprit. Check CPU and memory usage in all open applications by executing top. The command returns a list of every running process our your Mac, along with its allocated resources. The CPU field is easy enough to interpret--any process using more than half is sure to slow others down. The memory fields are a bit more complicated but, in general, the bigger the numbers, the greater the drain on your system.

If the problem app is visible on the Desktop, quit it as you normally would, using Command-Q or, if that fails to respond, using Force Quit (Command-Option-Escape).

But if the culprit is a lower-lever utility that runs behind the scenes, you’ll need more Terminal magic to end its misadventures. Make note of the problem process’s number in the PID column, and execute sudo kill PID-number, replacing PID-number with the application’s actual number. The targeted process will terminate, freeing up its system resources.

Be extremely careful when killing background processes. Some are necessary for OS X to function. Ideally, you would only use kill if you were absolutely certain that a third-party background utility was slowing you down.

24. Find Free Space On All Your Hard Drives

Screen shot of Terminal line code
You might find you have a lot more—or a lot less—free space on your drives than you thought.

At last count, our primary Mac was spread between three different hard drives--one internal for the OS and essential documents, and two externals for our photos, movies, and music. In this kind of setup, it can be difficult to know at a glance just how much free space you have left--and where, exactly, it is.

To see your free space, execute df -hl.

25. Snap superior screenshots

screen shot of capture command
Forget OS X’s built-in Grab utility. Snap a picture of whatever’s displaying onscreen and select the image file’s format and name with one Terminal command.

If OS X’s default screenshot settings don’t meet your needs, you can assign image formats and file names for screenshots on the fly with screencapture, which lets you take shots of DVD Player (usually forbidden by the Finder at the insistence of the movie industry’s copyright lawyers). To create an instant, noiseless capture, execute screencapture -x -t jpg capture.jpg.

Replace jpg with the 3-digit abbreviation for your chosen file format (PDF, TIF, GIF, and PNG are also available) and capture.jpg is the name of the saved file.

COMMENTS: 22

TAGS: Mac OS X, Terminal, Utility

COMMENTS

Great article
Submitted by Jamie on Thu, 2008-12-11 19:01

And lest some users are thinking this is too uber-geeky for mere mortals such as themselves, it's worth mentioning that highlighted text from any text document can be dragged right into an open terminal window. If anyone were uncomfortable typing directly in Terminal, they could save a document of their favorite commands and just drag 'em over. Easy.

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A very timely article!
Submitted by cyberdog on Thu, 2008-12-11 22:46

What a very timely article (for me at least!). I was just looking into this... It is always a hassle setting up a new computer, it would be nice if I could just run a script that would configure some/most of my system for me. I've found some commands that looked promising but ran into a few road blocks... I went to my local Apple Store and there the Genius told me that they didn't do Unix! That sucks. Here what I have so far:I randefaults read com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions{ IconViewOptions = { ArrangeBy = none; BackgroundFlags = 0; BackgroundType = DefB; FontSize = 12; GridSpacing = 73; IconSize = 48; PropertiesLocation = botm; ShowPreviewIcon = 1; ViewMoreInfo = 0; };}I could reset the icon size or the font size or the grid spacing but not all three of them at once by using one of the following:defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions -dict IconSize -integer 32;defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions -dict FontSize -integer 11;defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions -dict GridSpacing -integer 40;killall FinderI'd like to do something along the lines of:defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions { IconViewOptions = { FontSize = 11; GridSpacing = 40; IconSize = 32; };}But this does not work. Any ideas?

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A very timely article!!
Submitted by cyberdog on Fri, 2008-12-12 09:29

What a very timely article (for me at least!). I was just looking into this... It is always a hassle setting up a new computer, it would be nice if I could just run a script that would configure some/most of my system for me. I've found some commands that looked promising but ran into a few road blocks... I went to my local Apple Store and there the Genius told me that they didn't do Unix! That sucks. Here what I have so far:I randefaults read com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions{ IconViewOptions = { ArrangeBy = none; BackgroundFlags = 0; BackgroundType = DefB; FontSize = 12; GridSpacing = 73; IconSize = 48; PropertiesLocation = botm; ShowPreviewIcon = 1; ViewMoreInfo = 0; };}I could reset the icon size or the font size or the grid spacing but not all three of them at once by using one of the following:defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions -dict IconSize -integer 32;defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions -dict FontSize -integer 11;defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions -dict GridSpacing -integer 40;killall FinderI'd like to do something along the lines of:defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions { IconViewOptions = { FontSize = 11; GridSpacing = 40; IconSize = 32; };}But this does not work. Any ideas?

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Format for comment suck...
Submitted by cyberdog on Fri, 2008-12-12 09:30

How do you turn off the reformatting?

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If you're using TextEdit...
Submitted by LeftClicker on Sun, 2009-03-22 19:11

then click Format > Make Plain Text or press Shift-Command-T. This will strip the document of all formatting (e.g. font, color, italicize, etc.).

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Vi(m) customization
Submitted by b_dubb on Sat, 2008-12-13 02:17

i'd love to see some 411 on customizing Vi(m) on the mac. for when i want to edit a file without opening a bloated text editor (dreamweaver).

b

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Some good info, but...
Submitted by apstewart on Tue, 2008-12-30 18:00

I'm relieved to see you corrected the "key" on the image in tip #3 as printed in this issue of the magazine, which was grossly incorrect. Now just change #15 to use Ctrl-C to stop ping, instead of Ctrl-Z (not Command-Z) which just suspends a command instead of stopping it. Yes, the picture says "Stopped", but it's still running. Type "fg" after hitting Ctrl-Z and you'll be taken right back to the ping. Same Ctrl-Z foolishness on #17.

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Very good tips to follow. I
Submitted by freyutss on Fri, 2009-01-16 11:02

Very good tips to follow. I am sure that a lot of people didn't know about these things when it comes to using Mac. I am grateful that you thought about us and put this information in this post for us.

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Ctrl-Z
Submitted by ndrw on Thu, 2009-02-26 12:01

Hi,Just a quick note about Ctrl-Z. When you use Ctrl-Z to stop a job or process that is running, it doesn't "kill" that process, just interrupts it and makes it wait. This is actually quite handy at times, because you have some job control you can do afterward:1) run the "jobs" command to see a list of jobs you've got waiting.2) run the "fg %#" command to bring a command back to active from the jobs list (use the number instead of the pound symbol).3) run the "bg %#" command to let a job run in the background (great for calculations and tasks that don't have much output!).4) run the "kill %#" command to kill the job.Be sure to put the percent symbol before the jobs list number, especially with the kill command, otherwise, it will use the process id (run "ps auxw" to see a list of all processes).Cheers,Andrew

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SSH How do you find IP addresses of networked Macs using termina
Submitted by mattone on Wed, 2009-03-11 10:49

I enjoy these types of articles. Keep them coming.

Re: SSH
So now that I'm ready to ssh into another Mac (or pc) on my home network, how do I discover their IP addresses without getting up out of my chair? I know that I can walk around the house and look in the Network Prefs to learn the IP address but I want to do it remotely. In my old Linksys router there was a panel in the web admin control screen showing the IP addresses of all the clients on my network. I don't see this in the Airport Utility for my new Time Capsule.

Is there a way to use the terminal to do this?

Matt

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Fining IP addresses
Submitted by Grimshaw on Thu, 2009-05-07 04:20

You can use a little app called Flame that will list all the IP addresses in your network.

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Question about Secure Erase of Free Space on my HD
Submitted by The Disciple on Thu, 2009-03-19 12:26

I executed this command "diskutil secureErase freespace 3 /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD" and it's running the erase but it seems to have doubled the contents of the HD, if only temporarily. Is this normal cause there's like Zero room left on my HD? Will it go away after the erase is complete? I just backed up w/ time machine on an external so I'm not super worried, but I'd just like to know what's going on.

Thanks
Nick

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Follow up?
Submitted by random99access on Tue, 2009-03-24 11:59

How did this work out for you? Space back to normal?

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A few more tips!
Submitted by brawns214 on Mon, 2009-03-23 21:04

This list is great, and it goes from beginning to much more advanced.

Try

sudo !!
This reexecutes the last command entered as root. Great for when you get pesky 'Permission Denied' errors

A mac exclusive! When you have a file in the finder that you want to do something with, you can just drag it into terminal and it will put the path (the file's location) to that file where your cursor is.

Having trouble deleting a large amount of stuff from trash or taking too long to do the 'preparing to delete' thing? Try:

sudo rm -rf /.Trashes/*
or
sudo rm -rf /Volumes/Secondary-hard-drive/.Trashes/*

If you forget to put the .Trashes in the command, you could end up deleting a significant amount of important stuff.

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Good tips..
Submitted by lora.a on Fri, 2009-10-09 17:14

Guys always remember to quit an application before modifying its defaults.
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Those are some very good
Submitted by milkyglass on Thu, 2009-10-15 20:25

Those are some very good tips that everyone should pay attention to.
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Permission Errors?
Submitted by DSilda on Wed, 2009-10-28 17:25

I am the only one using my MacBook Pro. I would like to know where Permission errors come from.

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I am sure that a lot of
Submitted by lora.a on Wed, 2009-11-04 21:27

I am sure that a lot of people didn't know about these things when it comes to using Mac. I am grateful that you thought about us and put this information in this post for us.knee pain | pain relief

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