Commandline Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Terminal Tip: Syncing your iPhone or iPod touch from the command line

by Erica Sadun (Jan 16th, 2008)

This is one of those completely useless but cool things that one figures out when one is spending far too much time trying to do something else and not accomplishing it. In my case, I'm trying to figure out how to force an iPod touch or iPhone to load a backup set. (Do you know? Let me know in the ...

Yet even MORE evidence of upcoming iTunes rentals

by Erica Sadun (Nov 21st, 2007)

Today's evidence comes to you courtesy of the Apple iPhone. iPhone Developer Pumpkin. He has discovered even more rental-specific information, this time in the iPhone's lockdown daemon file. Lockdown is responsible for authorizing your iPhone for services. For example the lockdown files are ...

Grab Clean Leopard Window Shots with CleanGrab

by Erica Sadun (Nov 7th, 2007)

Ryan Irelan doesn't like the way Leopard grabs window shots. When you press Command-Shift-4/Spacebar, Leopard includes about 50 extra pixels of transparent background around your Windows. This extra space grabs the window's drop shadow along with the window itself. Enter CleanGrab. CleanGrab is ...

Play Audio URLs from the iPhone Command Line

by Erica Sadun (Aug 17th, 2007)

You never know when instant karma is gonna getcha. Take my playaudio application. Yesterday, I was chatting with some developer buddies about maybe putting together an Internet radio application and discussing the fact that the Celestial iPhone framework is essentially QuickTime repackaged. While ...

Open man pages from Xcode

by Mike Schramm (Jul 30th, 2007)

Toxic Software's posted a useful little script if you spend any amount of time in Xcode-- because manopen is having trouble with Leopard, John punched up a shell/Applescript to open man pages directly from within Xcode's command line. It's tiny (and doesn't really do much-- just opens an Xcode Help ...

Terminal Tip: Interactive Command-line File Encryption

by Erica Sadun (May 22nd, 2007)

In OS X, you can always toss a file onto the command line instead of laboriously typing out a complete path name because Terminal supports drag and drop. Over at Murphymac, Murphy has posted a video showing you how to create a shell script using DES3 encryption to protect your files. It takes ...

Terminal Tip: Output man pages as plain text with col

by Erica Sadun (Apr 19th, 2007)

Ever try to open a man page in TextEdit using man | open -f? You end up with the kind of unreadable repeated characters shown here. This all dates back to the days of dot matrix and daisy wheel printing when the only way you could produce bold type was to repeatedly print characters. Fortunately, ...

Sudos and sudon'ts

by Erica Sadun (Mar 21st, 2007)

I find that I'm visiting RixStep on a regular basis these days. Today I stumbled across this post about using root privileges and thought I'd share it with you. If you want to learn more about using Mac admin privileges, this might not be the best post to start. If you already have some familiarity ...

15 Nifty command line tricks to set various options

by Erica Sadun (Mar 20th, 2007)

UK website MacOSXTips has put together a list of 15 of their favorite command line preferences tricks. The tricks, which all use the defaults command, range from deactivating Dashboard, to showing hidden files in the Finder, to displaying all mail as plain text. I had a blast rediscovering some old ...

Monday man page: curl

by Michael Rose (Mar 5th, 2007)

Today's man page covers one of my favorite utilities: curl. No, it's not a haircare product -- it's one of the most flexible download tools in the kit bag, with the ability to handle almost any protocol that can be addressed via a URL (hence the name, short for "client for URLs"). If there's a ...

Monday man page: open

by Michael Rose (Feb 12th, 2007)

Just a quick hint for today's man page: the open command does just what you might think. It opens files, directories, applications or URLs; no muss, no fuss. For files, you can specify an application to open them with the -a flag (or just trust LaunchServices to pick the right app). If you want to, ...

The "Lost" prompt

by Erica Sadun (Dec 7th, 2006)

Blogger David Winter has a posted a cute how-to showing you how to change the prompt in your terminal to the ">:" used in Lost. Basically, you update your .zprofile or .bashrc or .kshrc to include the line export PS1=">: ". Me? I'm a csh weenie. I'd have to use set prompt=">: " to get the ...

Spotlight from the Command Line

by Erica Sadun (Nov 28th, 2006)

0xFE (pronounced "254" I suppose...) has a very nice how-to up showing how to use Spotlight metadata to find files from the command line. The post shows how the mdfind command goes beyond find, locate and various grep hacks to create flexible and powerful queries. Surprisingly enough, I couldn't ...

Disk Order - an advanced Finder replacement

by David Chartier (Jun 1st, 2006)

Disk Order is another app that takes a stab at replacing the Finder, but doesn't seem to take things quite as overboard as PathFinder. With tabbed file browser windows, built-in FTP client, command line tools and more, Disk Order should have a few things to offer anyone who feels like the Finder is ...

Switch iTMS countries via the command line

by Scott McNulty (Apr 13th, 2006)

I think we can file this one under 'Just because I can.' Erica Sadun has written a perl script that allows you to change your currently selected country in the iTunes Music Store. Both iTunes and Safari have to be open for this script to function. If you aren't a Terminal jockey you can just pop ...