8 Terminal lifehacks for OS X

Ged Carrollrenaissancechambara.jp

In this presentationProductivity lifehacks• Check the weatherNetworking and internet lifehacks• Ping a website• Find the network address

of every device on your network• Find out the details of a

domain name

System lifehacks• Change the screenshot

format• Show hidden files in

Finder • Show the folder path in

Finder• Strip out unnecessary

system animations

Productivity lifehacks

Check the weatherThis uses a little used Unix function called finger that was used to check if someone was logged into a machine.

finger city@graph.no

You get a metrogram which shows how the weather will change hour-by-hour over a 24-hour period

Networking and internet lifehacks

Ping a websiteThe ping command can come in handy for a couple of circumstances. Firstly, checking if your ’net connection works by pinging a stalwart of the web like Yahoo! or the BBC. It can also be used as an initial diagnostic for a website

ping yahoo.com (note: no http:// in this command)

It will continue pinging the website until you press ‘ctrl’ + ‘c’ keys

Find the network address of every device on your networkOne of the best ways to secure your wireless network is to assign access only to particular devices, as well as password protection. Finding the network address of every device is a good first place to start in order to understand what is connected on your network first of all.

arp –a

Once you have this audit of devices you use the physical or MAC address (looks like 8f:de:cc:37:8a:10) to lock your device to the network. Anything you don’t recognise will need to get tracked down

Get the details of a domain nameUnderstand where a website is hosted and contact details of the administrator of the site.

whois renaissancechambara.jp

There is additional information available on this record such as the age of the domain and renewal date

System lifehacks

Change the screenshot formatThe default file format for screen shots is PNG. I have found that PNGs don’t work well in some applications like PowerPoint when opened on a PC. Switching to JPEG means that you have something which works better

write com.apple.screencapture type jpeg (all lower case)

Dependent on your requirements you can change the format to: tiff pdf or back to png

Once you restart your machine the change should take effect

Show hidden files in the FinderOS X Finder hides a number of files by default (primarily so that users don’t delete anything important). If you really know what you are doing…

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

You can go back to normal again by

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

Show the path view in FinderGet the path view of a given folder in the chrome of the Finder window. It makes the path glanceable rather than having to ctrl + click on the folder icon at the very top of the finder window

defaults write com.apple.finder FXShowPosixPathInTitle –bool YES

If you want to change back

defaults write com.apple.finder FXShowPosixPathInTitle –bool NO

Strip out unnecessary system animationsDialogue boxes open with an animated effect, speeding up the opening time reduces the animation effect

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime 0.01

Disable automatic window animationsdefaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled –bool NO

If you want to switch window animations back ondefaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled –bool YES

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