Terminal Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

How to spring clean "Open With" duplicates

by Shawn "Doc" Boyd (Mar 25th, 2013)

If you use your Mac for any period of time, you will find the need to open a document with a different program other than the one set as default. The "Open With" menu appears in the Finder whenever you right-click or control-click on the icon of a document. The "Open With" command is designed ...

Terminally Geeky: How to tell if a script is being called from launchd

by TJ Luoma (Feb 25th, 2013)

Warning: command line geekiness ahead. When writing shell scripts, I often send interactive output to the user via echo to give feedback or information. But if the shell script is called on a schedule via OS X's behind-the-scenes process launcher launchd, rather than from a Terminal session, ...

Maniacally cuckoo for Mountain Lion: App Store checker shell script

by Erica Sadun (Jul 24th, 2012)

In the spirit of Tim Cook's maniacal excitement about upcoming Apple products, I bring to you the shell script you can run repeatedly from the command line to check the App Store to see if Mountain Lion is ready for purchase. This is what I used last year to check for Lion; it worked. This ...

How to enable iCal's debug menu

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Feb 24th, 2012)

ZDNet (via Macgasm) has posted a couple of neat iCal tweaks that should make your life a bit easier: Enabling the debug menu and showing two weeks worth of appointments at once. The trick involves a couple of Terminal commands. To enter debug mode, use the following: defaults write com.apple.iCal ...

How to backup your Mac App Store apps

by TJ Luoma (Jan 23rd, 2012)

The excellent ReadNow application, which allows you to easily read articles from your Instapaper and Read It Later articles on your Mac, has been pulled from the Mac App Store "...because of an infringement letter." Developer Michael Schneider added "[i]n my current situation I'm not allowed to ...

Mac 101: Encode media from Automator or the command line in Lion

by Kelly Hodgkins (Nov 22nd, 2011)

There's an easy way in OS X 10.7 Lion to convert video or audio from one format to another, using a fixed suite of conversion settings. One approach uses Automator and can be launched from the Finder. The other uses the Terminal application and the afconvert (for audio) or avconvert (for video) ...

Daily Mac App: Go2Shell

by Samuel Gibbs (Sep 13th, 2011)

Here on the Daily Mac App we love apps that do one thing really well. Today's app is no exception. Go2Shell is a tiny little 0.3MB app available for free from the Mac App Store that has the potential to speed up your work-flow if it involves Terminal. Go2Shell simply launches a Terminal ...

TUAW's Daily Mac App: DTerm

by Samuel Gibbs (Aug 2nd, 2011)

The Terminal is a Mac power-user's best friend. When you need to get something specific done, access the underlying system, modify files or change some settings, command line is often the best and only way to get it done. Instead of having to go to it, DTerm brings the command line to ...

Hackinations: 5 really good Lion tweaks

by Erica Sadun (Jul 26th, 2011)

Lion. We love the OS. We hate a few tiny details. Here are five extremely handy Lion tweaks that can improve your day-to-day use. Enable each by typing the supplied commands into Terminal. 1. Turn off those #*%(ing zooming windows Launch Safari or TextEdit and then hit Command-N a few times. ...

Lion: Deleting apps in Launchpad, and starting clean

by Michael Rose (Jul 25th, 2011)

Launchpad in Mac OS Lion shares a key behavior with its iOS counterpart: deleting an app from the launcher also uninstalls it from the computer, as long as the app was purchased from the Mac App Store. Of course, it's quick and easy to redownload the MAS apps if they're needed. While this ...

How to refresh OS X Lion's Launchpad contents

by Erica Sadun (Jul 21st, 2011)

The young guys over at HaiTeq have been running into issues with Launchpad updating after installing software that wasn't bought on the Mac App Store. Because of this, they've figured out a workaround to force Launchpad to refresh its data base. Removing the database files from the user's Dock ...

Open the Mac App Store in your browser

by Erica Sadun (Jul 14th, 2011)

I was up late last night building a Mac App Store scraper. In the process I discovered how to browse the store in Safari. Without further ado, let me share the geek. It turns out you can spoof curl with the Mac App Store user agent to access its data. You'll need to use Terminal for this ...

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 ...

Force your Mac to update malware definitions (Updated)

by Steven Sande (Jun 3rd, 2011)

You've updated your Mac with Security Update 2011-003, but how do you know if you have the latest malware definitions from Apple? Macworld had a nice technical note on how to force your Mac to update its malware definitions, so we thought we'd pass that knowledge along. To start, you can check ...

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 ...