Terminal tips Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Download Amazon MP3s in Terminal with clamz

by TJ Luoma (Nov 13th, 2011)

If you've ever wanted to download Amazon MP3s via Terminal or over ssh, or ever found yourself unable to use the "Amazon MP3 Downloader.app" then I have good news for you: there is another way. The problem Amazon's MP3 Store annoys me to no end. I love the deals that they occasionally ...

Why hibernate or 'safe sleep' mode is no longer necessary in OS X Lion (Updated)

by Chris Rawson (Aug 22nd, 2011)

Update: Several commenters expressed concern that disabling safe sleep could expose you to the possibility of drive corruption if you lose power or your machine spontaneously restarts. This particular fear is groundless; Safe Sleep doesn't have anything to do with volume corruption (except if ...

Make a backup copy of the MacBook Air USB Software Reinstall Drive

by TJ Luoma (Jul 14th, 2011)

Since it doesn't come with an optical drive, giving MacBook Air buyers a DVD of the operating system wouldn't be very helpful. That's why Apple's lightest laptop comes with the USB Software Reinstall Drive -- a very small white USB drive. Sometimes USB flash drives are referred to as "Thumb ...

Terminal Tip: Find out which files won't be backed up

by Samuel Gibbs (Apr 12th, 2011)

Backing up is one of the most important things you can do on a Mac, and thankfully, it's a pretty trivial affair with Time Machine built right in. Of course, when you're looking at what needs backing up, people often overlook what doesn't need backing up (or isn't, but should be). A good ...

Terminal Tips: More reliable SSH connections to your Back to My Mac hosts

by TJ Luoma (Nov 10th, 2010)

Back to My Mac is a feature of MobileMe that allows you to connect remotely to your Macs. Usually this is for screen-sharing or file-sharing through the Finder, but you can also connect via SSH. In the Terminal app (found in /Applications/Utilities/), you can connect via Shell » New Remote ...

Terminal Tips: bash cron script to keep an app running

by TJ Luoma (Oct 21st, 2010)

Do you have some apps that you want to keep running all the time? If so, and if you're not afraid of the Terminal or the command line, I have a script for you. When I come home at the end of the day, Dropbox has stopped running on my iMac. I'm running the latest version, and it works fine on my ...

How to kill that Ping drop-down in iTunes 10

by Dave Caolo (Sep 30th, 2010)

Apple recently updated iTunes to version 10.0.1 which, among other things, added drop-down access to Ping, Apple's social network for iTunes customers, into your library. Some of you like Ping more than others, and there are those in the latter group who are completely disinterested. The Mac ...

Terminal Tips: Generate random filenames for digital photo frame images

by Aron Trimble (Feb 25th, 2010)

It's not at all unlikely that you or a relative have received a digital photo frame as some sort of gift. The concept is great, one frame on your mantle, many pictures on display. Unfortunately, Apple has yet to enter the photo frame market -- at least until the iPad is released, that is. In the ...

Terminal Tips: Change the location of snapped screenshots

by Joachim Bean (Jul 28th, 2009)

Are you tired of all of those icons from screenshots you've taken cluttering up space on your desktop? If you would like them in a different place when you snap them, here's a command to change the location. Using the Terminal, enter the following command to change the location: defaults write ...

TUAW Tip: Moving your home folder to another disk (or moving it back)

by Robert Palmer (May 14th, 2009)

In ye olde times, with "Mack OSe 9," many users chose to keep their personal files, work, and documents on a different physical disk from their startup disk. It was a safety measure: If one disk goes down, at least the other won't. There was no structural reason to keep files in a particular disk ...

Safari 4 hidden preferences

by Mat Lu (Feb 25th, 2009)

There's quite a debate going on in the Mac web over Safari 4's new user interface. Personally, I think the new tab implementation is hideous, so I was glad to see that Caius Durling has discovered a bevy of hidden preferences for Safari 4. With a few quick Terminal commands you can restore sanity to ...

iLife Tip: Enable Multi-Touch maps in iPhoto '09

by Cory Bohon (Jan 28th, 2009)

After using iPhoto '09 for a couple days, I have come to love the new features, in particular the Places feature. However, one thing that annoyed me is that you cannot use the Multi-Touch feature on newer MacBooks to manipulate the maps (zooming in/out, etc.). However, thanks to a Tweet-tip from ...

Terminal Tip: Enable half-star ratings in iTunes

by Cory Bohon (Dec 31st, 2008)

Do you like giving ratings to songs in iTunes? If so, then you've probably noticed that you are only able to rate songs on a full-star basis, not enough granularity for some music fans... there's a longstanding AppleScript hack to enable half-stars, but now there's an easier way around this issue. ...

Terminal Tip: Change Time Machine backup interval

by Cory Bohon (Dec 8th, 2008)

Sometimes you want your Mac to be backed up more frequently than usual. If you want to instantly back up using Time Machine, you could click on the menu bar item and select "Back Up Now," but what if you want to change the backup interval indefinitely? With this Terminal Tip, you can do just that. ...

Terminal Tips: Play Tetris in Terminal

by Cory Bohon (Oct 1st, 2008)

Terminal boasts some cool, but hidden features that we like to call "Easter eggs." These "eggs" are hidden features that the developers build in (mostly for fun or laughs), that don't have anything to do with the functionality of the program. One of these "eggs" is the ability to play Tetris in ...