Top Terminal Commands Mac X

Terminal & Shell Basics

cmd+n – Open a new Shell in a new window
cmd+t – Open a new Shell in a new tab of the current window
control+d – Logout the Shell in the current tab / window
cmd+d – Split pane. this is not a new shell, just a way of displaying the current Shell.

System

Restart Mac OS X:

sudo shutdown -r now

Shutdown Mac OS X:

sudo shutdown now

Power Management / Energy Saving

Get overview of current Power Management Settings:

pmset -g

Put display to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity:

sudo pmset displaysleep 15

Put Computer to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity:

sudo pmset sleep 30

OS X Look and Feel

If you don’t like the way Mountain Lion now makes the User ‘Library’ folder invisible, you can disable this.

chflags nohidden ~/Library

…you don’t need to relaunch the Finder.

Disable Dashboard (don’t forget to drag the Dashboard Dock icon off the Dock too):

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock

Enable Dashboard:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
killall Dock

Force the Finder to show hidden files (very useful for Web Developers who need to edit .htaccess files, for example):

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

Force the Finder to hide hidden files (ie: back to the default setting):

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

Networking

Ping a host to see whether it’s available:

ping -o leftcolumn.net

Troubleshoot routing problems to a host using traceroute:

traceroute leftcolumn.net

Check whether a host is running an HTTP server (ie: check that a Web Site is available):

curl -I www.leftcolumn.net | head -n 1

Manage Windows networks (a drop-in for the NET command on Windows). Too many options to list here, so run this for details:

man net

Use dig to discover Domain information:

dig www.leftcolumn.net A
dig www.leftcolumn.net MX

…and you can also retrieve all available stuff in the DNS Zone for a domain with eg:

dig -t ANY google.co.nz

Who is logged in to your Mac?

w

What’s my user name? This is really useful for bash scripts etc.

whoami

Show routing table:

netstat -r

Show active network connections:

netstat -an

Show network statistics:

netstat -s

Troubleshooting

List all open files (this will take a few seconds to complete on most Macs):

lsof

Restart Bonjour – handy when a Mac ‘disappears’ from the Network:

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

Eject a CD… it’s never happened to me but you can eject a stuck cd with the following. Note that it won’t always be ‘disk1′:

diskutil eject disk1

Text Manipulation terminal commands

Count number of lines in the text in the Clipboard:

pbpaste | wc -l

Count number of words in the text in the Clipboard:

pbpaste | wc -w

Sort lines of text in the Clipboard and copy them back to the Clipboard:

pbpaste | sort | pbcopy

Reverse each line of text in the Clipboard (ie: make each line appear backwards) and copy them back to the Clipboard:

pbpaste | rev | pbcopy

Strip duplicate lines from lines of text in the Clipboard and copy only one instance of each duplicate line back to the Clipboard (output is sorted):

pbpaste | sort | uniq | pbcopy

Find duplicate lines from lines of text in the Clipboard and copy only one instance of each duplicate line (stripping non-duplicates) back to the Clipboard (output is sorted):

pbpaste | sort | uniq -d | pbcopy

Strip duplicate lines from lines of text in the Clipboard and copy only one instance of each line (stripping duplicates entirely) back to the Clipboard (output is sorted):

pbpaste | sort | uniq -u | pbcopy

Tidy up HTML in the Clipboard and copy it back to the Clipboard:

pbpaste | tidy | pbcopy

Display the first 5 lines from the Clipboard:

pbpaste | head -n 5

Display the last 5 lines from the Clipboard:

pbpaste | tail -n 5

Convert tabs to spaces for the lines in the Clipboard:

pbpaste | expand | pbcopy

Other useful commands

Password protect your web site! Create a CRYPTed user/password for using in a .htpasswd file. Save the outputted results of A below to a file called .htpasswd in the directory you want to secure. Then save the contents of B to a file called .htaccess in the same folder.

A:

htpasswd -nb username password

B:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "restricted area"
AuthUserFile /path/to/your/site/.htpasswd
require valid-user

Display a history of commands used in the terminal by the current user:

history

Convert a file to HTML. Support formats are Text, .RTF, .DOC.

textutil -convert html file.extension

Nano is a very easy-to-use text editor for quick changes to text files. It is less powerful than VIM but has the advantage of clearly showing you the common editing commands:

nano [file_to_edit]

…In nano, use ctrl+o to Save and ctrl+x to quit.

Greg shared a way of tidying the terminal window. Essentially this command scrolls down a page, clearing the current view:

clear

iTunes

Change iTunes link behaviour to point at local iTunes Library instead of iTunes Store:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

Change iTunes link behaviour to point at iTunes Store instead of local iTunes Library (ie: back to the default):

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool NO