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Mac OS X Tips

OSXFAQ Daily Unix Tricks

OSXFAQ Mac OS X System Tips

Dr. Mac's OS X Speed Tips For TechTV's "The Screen Savers" On 4-10-02

OSXFAQ - Reader Tips

Dumb Terminal Tricks
Unix - CLI

  • From the shell, type cal to get the current month's calendar.
  • Use sudo from the shell to run a command as root, ie 'sudo vi /etc/rc.conf'.
  • Use 'nidump passwd .' instead of 'cat /etc/passwd'.
  • Type top to monitor process activity.
  • Type 'ps -aux' to see what programs are running on your computer.
  • Type w to see who is doing what on your box.
  • Type ifconfig -a to see what your current IP address is (good for DHCP, etc).
  • Use locate to find things that Sherlock can't or won't show you. (Use 'sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb' first.)
  • Use /etc/crontab to fire off programs at an hourly, nightly, or weekly basis.
  • The grep program is an incredibly fast way of finding text inside a file, or even inside a huge directory of files. Learn to use it, particularly with the -i, -c, and -v options.
  • The find command has tremendous power when used with the -exec option. Rather than finding specific files (locate is much faster), find truly excels at running a particular command against every file in a nested directory tree.
  • Anything that you do more than twice deserves to be automated, preferrably with a Perl script :-)
  • Whenever you see a command described as 'grep(1)', 'nidump(8)', etc, that means that you can get the manual pages for that command by typing 'man 8 nidump'. (See man(1) :-)
  • Run 'defaults domains' and 'defaults read APP.NAME.HERE' to examine preferences of from the command line!
  • Type 'open .' to cause your current directory to open as a Finder window.
  • Running the command, "sudo update_prebinding -root /" is rumoured to speed up OS X on older machines. It has been proven by the timing of app launches. Give it a try!
  • Hold down Alt/Option key when starting Apps to close the folder from where you started the app.
  • To improve MacOS X speed, backup, reformat 2 partitions, install 9.1 first on the second partition, and disable any extensions that are duplicated by X drivers such as ATI extensions and the OpenGL ATI extension. Full details man

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