Per the Windows and Linux threads, what commands do you find most useful in Mac OS X Server (or Client)?
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agreed, this site seems to be far more negative that stackoverflow, people seem poised to 'down' any post they don't think meets their standards - it's enough to make me walk away.– Chopper3May 12, 2009 at 13:15
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thx, chopper3. maybe it was voted down for being mac related. i can understand not wanting to see a lot of apple stuff, but really just add /ignore "mac" to your tags, and it's sorted– usernameMay 12, 2009 at 13:23
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2there's loads of apple specific stuff on this site, people here just seem to enjoy being negative.– Chopper3May 12, 2009 at 13:29
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2to be expected i suppose... we are sysadmins :-)– usernameMay 12, 2009 at 13:32
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1I like your username...username :)– Chopper3May 12, 2009 at 13:35
55 Answers
Truly Mac only: I saw 'open .' above, but open will open any document or app you pass to it.
Generic Unix that I use the most: sudo is pretty handy for changing system config files, etc, which I actually edit in vi.
kill can't be overstated when something hangs (or when another user is still logged into my desktop in the background and I want to log them out, nasty I know but it's my desktop)
ssh/scp - I love that in OSX I can just open a terminal and connect to any of our servers. That alone made me happy to drop Windows.
ifconfig/ping/whois/nmap etc
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1Well,
open
is not so truly Mac only... On Windows this command is namedstart
(based on the file extension for files, though internet addresses are supported as well).– ArjanAug 11, 2009 at 15:04 -
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I believe you should usually use
xdg-open
rather thangnome-open
because it's portable to other desktop environments (XFCE, KDE, etc).– GlyphJun 8, 2012 at 21:51
If you want to know what sort of line endings a file has, just run
file /path/to/your-file
ex:
$ file imports/sample-students.txt
imports/sample-students.txt: ASCII text, with CR line terminators
scutil --dns
Will display the order for DNS resolution. Useful for when you're creating or debugging your Network settings.
lsof -i
lists Internet ports that are open. Sample output:
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
SystemUIS 223 clinton 11u IPv4 0x3e21b08 0t0 UDP *:*
ARDAgent 262 clinton 16u IPv4 0x3e21be0 0t0 UDP *:net-assistant
ARDAgent 262 clinton 18u IPv4 0x5f01a68 0t0 TCP *:net-assistant (LISTEN)
AppleVNCS 263 clinton 4u IPv6 0x3e274bc 0t0 TCP *:vnc-server (LISTEN)
Opera 48365 clinton 20u IPv4 0x5f01e64 0t0 TCP WTD-Staff-BlackmoreC:57094->stackoverflow.com:http (ESTABLISHED)
Opera 48365 clinton 23u IPv4 0x5b12a68 0t0 TCP WTD-Staff-BlackmoreC:57095->stackoverflow.com:http (ESTABLISHED)
Use sudo
if you want the ports open by all users, and the flags -n
and -P
will disable name resolution and port names and give you numbers instead.
ifconfig | grep cast
is great for getting your IP address, and
ifconfig en1 | grep eth
works well for getting a MAC address. Using en1 will (almost always) get the Airport's MAC address, which is handy if only known devices are allowed onto your wireless network. Conversely, if you use en0 -- the built-in ethernet port -- you can then look the machine up in your Open Directory, like so:
ldapsearch -x -h odm -b "cn=computers,dc=odm,dc=pretendoco,dc=com" "macAddress=00:0d:93:b5:82:88"
(Assuming your server was 'odm' and the realm is ODM.PRETENDCO.COM).
ipconfig is sometimes useful:
Getting current IP address on interface:
$ ipconfig getifaddr en1
10.110.2.25
Getting the DHCP information that was last received:
$ ipconfig getpacket en1
op = BOOTREPLY
htype = 1
flags = 0
hlen = 6
hops = 0
xid = 143857879
secs = 0
ciaddr = 0.0.0.0
yiaddr = 10.110.2.25
siaddr = 0.0.0.0
giaddr = 0.0.0.0
chaddr = 00:aa:bb:cc:dd:ee
sname =
file =
options:
Options count is 7
dhcp_message_type (uint8): ACK 0x5
server_identifier (ip): 1.1.1.1
lease_time (uint32): 0xe10
router (ip_mult): {10.110.0.1}
domain_name_server (ip_mult): {1.1.1.1, 1.1.1.2}
subnet_mask (ip): 255.255.252.0
end (none):
This question overlaps quite a bit with this one about tools a UNIX administrator cannot live without. Many of the command-line tools for Mac OS X have UNIX roots, such as df
, du
, and which
; however there are notable exceptions that have no obvious UNIX equivalents, such as osascript
, open
, pbcopy
, pbpaste
, and say
.
How to enable Time Machine to backup to a NAS.
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Find MAC address
ifconfig en0 | grep ether | sed s/://g | sed s/ether//
Command to create sparsebundle to copy over to NAS
sudo hdiutil create -nospotlight -library SPUD -size 160g -fs "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname "<VOLNAME>" ./<HOSTNAME>_<MAC_ADDRESS>.sparsebundle
Works like charm backing up to my ReadyNAS.
It is a freeware third-party tool, but
edit
is really handy. It is a command-line tool that you can optionally install the first time you run TextWrangler. [Other text editors (BBEdit, TextMate) likely provide something analogous.]
edit path/to/somefile
Opens up the file in TextWrangler, and will let you authenticate if you don't normally have permission to edit it. (You can even do it from an ssh session, and it'll open it for the logged-in graphical user).
Better still is that you can pipe things to it.
lsof -i | edit
for example, will show you your open network connections and open them up in TextWrangler, where you can search (and scroll) through them easily.
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1There is a similar Textmate version called "mate" which is installed with the editor.– bjtitusJul 5, 2009 at 23:32
Gain a root shell without enabling the root user (as Apple itself requires sometimes in their docs in order to do some "geeky" stuff, ie to set system-wide language)
sudo bash
This gives you a root shell where you can do everything you want as root, without having to prepend every command with the sudo command.
This may be dangerous, but we are sysadmins, we know what we are doing, don't we? :)
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2I prefer "sudo -s", it's shorter and I think it may do some specific processing to start the shell "properly".– w00tAug 18, 2009 at 0:22
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Yes, but I prefer explicitly run bash for more than a reason: - may be there is no env $SHELL defined - may be $SHELL or /etc/password define a different shell (sh, ksh, etc) - I don't think "-s" would do any magic in running the shell "properly" But you are right, this is an alternative. +1 for you– drAlberTAug 18, 2009 at 7:36
killall -9 appname
force quits an app. Pretty useful if you can't get into Activity Monitor.
Apart from the usual Unix suspects I find the following useful :-
dsconfigad - Edits the Active Directory settings and binds a computer
defaults - Edit preferences
plutil - Converts plist to and from text
softwareupdate - run Software Update from the command-line
installer - install packages from the command-line
networksetup - set and get various things such as the computer name
If you master those and the usual Unix stuff you have all you need for Mac administration from the command-line.
I just found out that there's a nifty bash construct that you can use instead of the seq command missing in Mac OS:
echo { 18..21 }
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OSX has the BSD-derived
jot
utility that romps all overseq
. Check it out. Mar 18, 2011 at 3:28
A bit pedestrian for this audience, no doubt, but I use:
screencapture -i -c
to grab whatever I want from the screen It's really handy and does things that Grab won't allow me to grab.
du -d 1 -h
Displays disk usage statistics for the current directory in human readable form.
man [command]
One of the most used commands. Tells you how to use everything else.
sudo slapconfig -destroyldapserver
Force Demote an LDAP Replica to Standalone. If your Open Directory Master is misconfigured, sometimes trying to demote an Open Directory Replica using Server Admin will fail (eg: you might find your Replica server refuses to demote). You can use slapconfig to force it to demote on these occasions.
which program
searched the path for program, and tells you which executable is invoked if you run program without specifying a full path.
It is usually most useful as a shorthand for typing a path.
$ which python
/usr/bin/python
$ ls -l `which python`
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 72 30 Jan 22:56 /usr/bin/python -> ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/bin/python
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"type -a foo" will show you all programs named foo, and works for all Bourne shells.– w00tAug 18, 2009 at 0:20
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sqlite3 foo.db
Starts an interactive SQLite session. If foo.db does not exist, it will be created.
These are basic, but handy if you have amnesia:
Who am I?
id
Where am I standing?
pwd
What building am I?
hostname
What's its address?
ifconfig |grep inet
OS X specific things I haven't seen mentioned:
mdfind
uses the Spotlight search indexes from the commandline, so you can do full-text searches without using the Search pulldown.
networksetup -
will show you all the crazy syntax it supports; this is the commandline equivalent of the Network preference pane.
sudo launchctl list
- shows the running launchctl jobs. remember launchctl stop X.XX.X
will just 'stop' (kill) the currently running instance of a persistent process; to really make it stop running use launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/X.XX.X.plist
.
What DHCP licenses does the client hold?
sudo ls -lt /private/var/db/dhcpclient/leases
List the firewall allow/denies:
sudo ipfw list
Generate a high-entropy password (double click on a promising 16 character string to copy/paste):
head -c90 /dev/random | uuencode -m pwd | hexdump -C
Ever wanted to know what the IP address of another Mac that you can see is in the Finder is on your LAN thanks to Bonjour?
dscacheutil -q host -a name OtherMac.local
dscacheutil is surprisingly useful and versatile. You can do a lot more with it than just flush the DNS cache (as mentioned elsewhere here), i.e. user lookups and cache stats and dumps.
locate "foo"
Displays any file on your system with "foo" in its filename. I must use this almost as often as I use Spotlight.
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3mdfind will query spotlight from the command line. See tuaw.com/2008/01/04/… May 29, 2009 at 15:30
Maybe not the most "useful" command but say
is pretty fun.
For example say I love serverfault
to have it read back what you type after "say."