Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alifatisk | Hacker News Reader

Very cool finding! Made me want to explore what other tools my mac has pre-installed in /usr/bin

One nice thing about macOS is that many of the system GUI tools are graphical wrappers around a command-line tool that does the real work.

Most of them live in /usr/sbin

I keep a list for my students. Here are some:

   diskutil
   mdfind
   mdutil
   plutil
   networksetup
   softwareupdate
   screencapture
   pmset
   hdiutil
   pkgutil
   caffeinate
   osascript
   defaults
   launchctl

For example, mdfind lets you use Spotlight search on the command line. diskutil powers "Disk Utility.app". pkgutil lets you install .pkg files and also get information about programs installed that way. screencapture lets you take screenshots from the command line (you can specify which windows, etc.)

Anyhow, there's a bunch.

There are also random useful executables not in $PATH. This program powers your WiFi menu:

   /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport

Try "airport -I"

A silly one-liners to print out your overall WiFi strength:

   airport -I | grep -E 'agrCtlRSSI|agrCtlNoise' | awk '{print $2}' | sed -e 'N;s/\n/ - /' | bc

Put that in a script called "wifi-strength" and walk around your house with a laptop while running the following:

   watch -n1 "wifi-strength | say"

What a goldmine, thanks!

Very Nice! One caveat is that say won't speak the "minus" if your SNR became negative.

echo '-30' | say

echo '\-30' | say

Thanks!

Nitpick: In general, the graphical tools don’t literally invoke the command-line tools. Rather, both the graphical tool and the command-line tool use the same C or Objective-C API (usually private and undocumented) provided by some system framework. But the command-line tools do tend to be more direct reflections of the underlying API, and more flexible.

Oops.

Yeah, I knew some of them did and then at some point I just started tossing more programs in the list as I ran across them.

Personally I found it interesting that:

* TFTP server [1]

* PF Firewall [2]

* pbcopy & pbpaste [3]

are built-in in MacOS.

Here[4] is list of MacOS command line man pages, some interesting tools can be found there.

[1] https://rick.cogley.info/post/run-a-tftp-server-on-mac-osx/

[2] https://iyanmv.medium.com/setting-up-correctly-packet-filter...

[3] https://osxdaily.com/2007/03/05/manipulating-the-clipboard-f...

[4] https://ss64.com/osx/

Pbcopy/pbpaste are huge productivity boosters for me

Pb stands for pasteboard and not for lead. :D

http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/...

I have a shell alias so I can just type pb to do pbpaste|pbcopy - easiest way I’ve found to strip formatting and get plain text.

It's a little awkward, but Cmd-Opt-Shift-V is "Paste and Match Style" aka "paste as plain text".

Pro-tip (at least for me): control (^) doesn't change this, so you can just hold all the modifier keys rather than trying to remember which 3 let you paste as plain text.

If you like those, see also, off the top of my head and in no particular order: system_profiler, ioreg[1], networksetup, afconvert, sips, osascript, lsregister[2], apfs.util[3], and, from Xcode, GetFileInfo and SetFile.

All have man pages except lsregister; lsregister with no arguments shows help (for context, lsregister is useful when file icons / associations get messed up).

[1] A GUI version is also available as IORegistryExplorer.app in the Xcode "Additional Tools" packages available from

https://developer.apple.com/download/all/

(registration required)

[2] /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister

[3] /System/Library/Filesystems/apfs.fs/Contents/Resources/apfs.util

Reply on news.ycombinator.com