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Posts tagged with commands.
mdutil lets you manage OS X’s Spotlight indexes from the command line.
If you notice Spotlight’s mds process using up a lot of CPU, erasing and rebuilding the indexes for all volumes can fix the problem:
sudo mdutil -aE
Or, if you want Spotlight to stop indexing a particular volume (a backup drive, for example), run the following:
mdutil -E -i off /Volumes/MyBackupDrive
A handy command line titbit:
!something
will issue the last command that matches “something”.
If your short term memory is as bad as mine, this can be a bit dangerous. So I always do
!something:p
first, which prints the last matching command without running it.
This works in bash, tcsh, and zsh; I’m not sure about other shells.
If you have Python installed, you can quickly serve up HTML files from any directory with:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
The tr utility copies the standard input to the standard output with substitution or deletion of selected characters.
You might use it to convert text from upper to lower case:
cat upper-case.txt | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' > lower-case.txt
Or to extract a list of all the words used in a text:
tr -cs '[:lower:][:upper:]' '[\n*]' words.txt
!* will insert all the arguments from your previous command.
Handy if you run a command, but forget one argument; or if you open a file with one program and decide you’d be better off using another.
sips is a handy little image manipulation utility that ships with OS X.
To rotate an image 90° clockwise:
sips -r 90 pretty-picture.jpg
To resize an image so that it’s 500 pixels wide:
sips --resampleWidth 500 pretty-picture.jpg
For simple tasks like that, it’s a lot quicker than firing up an image editor (even Preview).
When you really want to delete a file, and make it very hard to recover, shred can come in handy:
shred -u -z -n 10 plan-for-world-domination.txt
The above will overwrite your plan-for-world-domination.txt file with random ones and zeros 10 times, remove the file and finally overwrite it with zeros (in a bid to hide the fact you’ve shredded the file).
Needless to say, shred should be used with caution.
From the look man page:
The look utility displays any lines in file which contain string as a prefix.
Handy enough. But if you don’t point look at a particular file, it defaults to using your system’s dictionary, which turns it into a quick spell-checker for the command line (or a way to remember that word that’s on the tip of your tongue).
