Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities | Hacker News Reader

Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities

weiyen.net

837 pointsyen223232 comments

A couple more:

    afconvert(1) - an audio file format converter, which includes Apple's superior AAC codec from the Core Audio framework

    diskutil(8) - tons of tools for fixed and removable storage

Examples:

    afconvert in.wav -o out.m4a -q 127 -s 2 -b 160000 -f m4af -d 'aac '

    mb=300; diskutil eraseVolume APFS myramdisk `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://$((mb*2048))`

> afconvert

Oh wow! A while back I ripped some concert audio from Youtube, but it was too large for me to sync using my `iTunes Match`. I've been too lazy to figure out how to downsample it juuuuust enough. But it looks like this works right out of the box

How does that compare with ffmpeg? The arguments seem about the same.

afcovert uses the superior inbuilt AAC converter. FFmpeg can do this as well with the right arguments but you have to dig them up and the quality is capped to a lower value than you can get with afconvert.

There's no reason to use AAC when we have both OPUS and FLAC.

I have three reasons: when using a good encoder (Core Audio, FDK or Nero) it's a quality-wise better lossy format than MP3, it's smaller than FLAC which matters for storage footprint, and unlike Opus and FLAC it's supported pretty much everywhere. At some point Opus will reach the same level of adoption and that's the point where I'll make the switch from AAC, because Opus is evidently a better lossy encoder per same bitrate.

Opus is today in every smartphone. MP3's died. No one cares about AAC.

You are using Opus on most VoIP/call providers.

Meanwhile, AAC, MP3, OGG... are history today.

> You are using Opus on most VoIP/call providers.

No. Opus support in the PSTN is still unfortunately almost non-existent. Adoption is growing but the pace is very slow. Source: me, working in the European telecommunications industry for over a decade, specializing in telephony and SMS.

It’s nuts using youtube-dl and unwrapping to get the opus files are like 96kbs and sound good. 96kbs mp3 would need to mix to mono and still sound like gravel.

I like to load WAVs on my iphone if lossless uncompressed available. AAC is the next highest quality supported lossy compression file in apple music app. From my understanding they won’t ever go to flac or opus because don’t want software decompression.

I like opus on VLC for youtube-dl rips but if I’m buying music I want lossless uncompressed.

Isn't -c:a aac_at the same? And then designate bitrate?

ffmpeg offers a few different encoders for many of its supported audio/video formats, and the result depends on what encoder you tell ffmpeg to use. It does not have support for using Core Audio on macOS but it does offer FDK AAC, which is one of the better AAC encoders available today - though not nearly as good as the one available in Core Audio.

Do you have any sources/informations on an objective comparison of encoders quality ?

Way back then (iPod era), I made an exposé for a science exam (small paper), proving that AAC was indeed better than MP3 both subjectively and objectively at most bitrates. This is how I got introduced to Fourier transforms and the likes; it was very interesting to see that you can literally "see" the difference in quality on the encoded waveform output.

But I just used the default encoders on the Mac and I didn't think about going in deep into encoder comparisons at the time. Does it matter that much? From what I know, it just about properly programming a math spec, with some tricks but I wonder if that makes that much of a difference.

In any case, above 256kbps it takes a very skilled listener to correctly identify encoded music. Apple has some useful tools for that, particularly AU Lab that allows you A/B testing of tracks with on-the-fly encoding. https://www.apple.com/apple-music/apple-digital-masters/

Today OPUS is on par of AAC if not better. We aren't at the MP3/OGG times.

Opus is better at same bitrate - not by much, but all the same it has the upper hand.

>not by much

You are deluded, then. Or deaf. Most MP3 podcasts at 128 KBPS sound worse than an OPUS file @64.

I'm neither deaf nor deluded. You're not reading me correctly. I'm saying that Opus is better than AAC, but not by much. Compared to MP3 it's a lot better.

One source would be the Hydrogen Audio forums where there are regular scientific comparisons - PSNR etc. instead of blind listening tests - between various encoders and formats. Apple's AAC encoder consistently comes out well above anything MP3, best of all the AAC encoders, and up at the absolute top together with Opus which produces a bit better results per same bitrate.

> Does it matter that much? From what I know, it just about properly programming a math spec, with some tricks but I wonder if that makes that much of a difference.

It does matter a lot and the difference can be staggering. Producing the audio bitstream is a case of both effectively analyzing the original input and programmatically expressing the waveform as correctly and as efficiently possible. Two excellent examples: the old MP3 encoder Xing, which compared to LAME produces very poor material even at higher bitrates, and one of the earliest open-source AAC encoders, FAAC, which also renders a very poor product. A lot of "early adopters" got bitten by FAAC and many of them still stubbornly cling to the misunderstanding that AAC is a worse format than MP3.

OK I get it. Isn't all that because it is rather hard to correctly implement such math trickery? Since it's not just about manipulating bits, you need to have a pretty good background in physics to do it properly. The more you know about the physics of sound the cleverer you can be about what to discard and what to keep.

I have used Macs since my youth and used iTunes before it was even called that, so encoder quality was never a problem I had. I guess I'll revisit the topic more deeply one of these days, still not that keen on that much math though.

>From what I know, it just about properly programming a math spec

Incorrect. The specification only concerns the bitstream and the decoding. Encoders are free to do whatever they want, as long as they produce a valid bitstream.

That makes sense.

Of course, the implementations are going to have varying performance depending on code quality/optimisations but that's a given.

Edit: some other poster gave some cues to my question. I guess you can do some trickery by decomposing the waveform before encoding and recomposing it.

I'll read more on the specs.

It all boils down to the psychoacoustic model in the encoder. It determines how the bitrate is allocated to various parts of the spectrum, depending on the audio signal.

It does. -c:a aac_at uses Core Audio (_at means AudioToolbox).

"superior" ... It looks silly to include such a judging adjective in the description of a comman line utility. I don't need "subtle" Apple ads on the command line. And aac is about the last format I would choose, encoding my audio in.

To be very clear, the man page is claiming that Apple's implementation of the AAC codec [the encoder specifically] is superior to other implementations of AAC encoding; not that AAC is superior to other audio codecs.

If you're wondering how one implementation of an audio codec could be superior to others — mostly, it's because any lossy audio codec has an encoding phase called "psychoacoustic compression", where each implementation of the codec is free to do whatever it likes to "simplify" the waveform in some way (most easily pictured: by taking a Discrete Cosine Transform of the waveform, and then quantizing / convoluting some parts of the frequency space. Like what JPEG does to discard information from the chroma channels.)

IIRC, rather than blunt-force quantization, Apple's AAC encoding does clever things (akin to the instrument separation done to audio in Melodyne) to split the waveform into "features", and then discards information in such a way that the features' separability is maintained (i.e. it doesn't become harder to "pick out" any given "sound" from the audio.)

Correct. Though AAC (when produced with a proper encoder) surpasses all other lossy formats with the exception of Opus.

Its quality is technically superior as evident from the product's PSNR and other factors. There are no "ads" here, I'm not a brand warrior, and nobody cares what formats are the last ones you'd encode your audio in.

I think those are the commenter's descriptions, not Apple's man page synopses. My system has

     afconvert -- Audio File Convert
     diskutil -- Modify, verify and repair local disks.

Mostly I use XLD (https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html) for audio conversion (as I'm mostly converting from .BIN + .CUE to "iTunes Plus" AAC for uploading to iTunes Match); but my understanding is that under the covers it's mostly just using afconvert (or whatever the system-framework equivalent of it is.)

So if your needs are just "one audio file in, one audio file out, and let me tell you exactly what it should look like", then afconvert is probably what you want.

XLD is great. The best thing about it is the heavy parallelization if you have many cores to throw at the problem. You can convert mountains of albums very fast.

Love those type of OG Mac indie software.

Yes, iTunes also uses the same Core Audio framework. In fact, even iTunes on Windows uses the same code base through the Quicktime-for-Windows libraries it runs off of.

I prefer to encode with afconvert on the command line because it gives me a few more options for tweaking things, that I don't have access to in iTunes (or "Music" as it's called these days). Additionally, I use a simple shell script that handles all of it when for example ripping a whole CD.

+1 to XLD. I have been using it for years, it's a wonderful piece of software.

> afconvert

See also XACT[1]. It's a macOS GUI, but it's nerd-friendly.

[1] http://xact.scottcbrown.org

There's also afplay - Audio File Play (plays an audio file to the default audio output). Can play all audio formats supported by CoreAudio.

Few additions.

open -n file.pdf : opens new instance of Preview application which is useful if you want to open the same file twice (for example to look at different pages at once).

caffeinate -d : prevents display turning off, useful if you want to look at display without moving mouse.

open -a is nice, i use it with alias, ex:

  alias qt='open -a "quicktime player"'
  alias vlc='open -a "vlc"'

At least for me (I've installed vlc via homebrew), there is a vlc binary in the PATH, and I can just vlc <filename>

The point here is to open a document with an app not assigned as default for the given mime-type by file name extension.

Does `open` give focus? It used to, but since a few releases ago the app opens in the background, which is pretty annoying.

My poor workaround is to use osascript: `tell application "System Events" to set frontmost of process "Finder" to true`

Apparently, it does. There is a -g flag (background) to prevent focus.

Isn’t open opening apps in the background a consequence of having “secure keyboard entry” enabled in Terminal.app?

`caffeinate -disu` is the best combination (that is, enable all options): your laptop won't go to sleep, won't dim the screem etc.

I use this all the time:

open -a <GUI Application> <File>

Handy for distinguishing between editing and consuming media.

Also, `cd .` to open the current directory in a Finder window.

Not mine (found online years ago), but here's the opposite. `cd` into the frontmost Finder window:

  cd "$(osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to POSIX path of (insertion location as alias)')";

You mean `open .`

Yeah, I had just woke up. Drat.

You can also just drag the proxy icon onto the terminal window for its path, ie “cd “ <drop>, enter.

I use that all the time. You can also cmd-c copy a file in Finder then paste into the terminal to get its path.

I genuinely didn't know this. I would have thought I had to do the "copy as pathname" trick with a right-click while holding Option. I already knew the drag and drop feature, so this doesn't really save me time, but it's good to know another nice feature.

open -a "Finder" . - open Finder in the current directory.

Standard apps usually just need the name, like Finder and Safari but you can also specify the path "/Applications/DifferentFinder.app"

`open .` works for me too

Yeah, I scrolled a bit and noticed that. Never thought about using just that.

Also `open -R path/to/file` opens Finder in the containing directory with the file highlighted (and thus scrolled into view). I use this with a script that takes a screen recording and trims some specified seconds off the end and converts it to mp4 to be smaller when I upload into a Github PR description. Easiest to drag and drop the converted file, y'see.

Finder is pretty good, and it's handy to be able to open it from the terminal. But I find it super annoying it litters everything with .DS_Store files and there is no way to turn that off, except for external and network drives. Aside from, obviously, using a different file manager. Very un-Apple.

Actually, .DS_Store is very Apple indeed (not that I care much).

The .DS_Store files are not Finder specific; Apple treats everything as a file (including folders), and it exists to supply folders and the files within them with metadata.

It is just the first time the .DS_Store file is needed is often when the folder is touched by Finder.

.DS_Store is also a bug. I’m not sure why it hasn’t been fixed. It’s history is quite interesting but I don’t recall where I read about it.

https://www.arno.org/on-the-origins-of-ds-store linked from original Hacker News thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40870357

Well those files are to keep the view/presentation settings.

I guess you could do that centrally with some sort of database but that would open another can of worms; and most importantly you wouldn't be able to transfer a folder and keep its Finder presentation intact.

Nowadays it's not as useful because of the App Store but when software was only released as .dmg images, it became expected to open a nice layout with graphics presenting the app and a shortcut to the App folder that you would drag'n'drop the app bundle to.

This presentation relies of .DS_Store to work.

There are some other use cases like that, it all comes down to a simple fact: Apple has always cared a lot more about how things look than Microsoft ever did, this is a perfect example.

There are extended attributes which could be used for this task.

I don't think xattr works for folders. And you still wouldn't have the fancy presentation you can get with .DS_Store with the graphics and all that jazz.

Of course, they could rethink the whole thing but the point is that it's a legacy thing and at this time it's not worth dedicating much ressource to a solve problem just to remove some mostly invisible files (on UNIXs). It's really easy to have scripts to cleanup for sharing to outside world, even some zip utilities do that automatically.

It can be annoying but it's really not a big deal, I doubt they could come up with something much better while still preserving the functionality and not making another complicated/convoluted proprietary folder format that wouldn't transfer any better to Windows...

you can just

    open .

unless you've reconfigured something else to open directories, which most people haven't.

You can also `open -R file` to select that file in Finder.

Don't forget about "open -b <bundle_id> foo.txt" for example,

    open -b com.sublimetext.4 file.txt

I prefer this vs using the App Name or Path, since those can vary depending on the system or app version. The bundle ID is more robust.

caffeinate -d is incredibly useful for work... uh reasons

Jiggler is better for that at least from a set-it-and-forget-it perspective vs. caffeinate where you have to manually set it.

That's one of macOS pitfalls: the inability to open 2 instances of the same app, simply using the default GUI is annoying sometimes.

I think Windows is right in that matter...

Another useful caffeinate tip is the `-w` option.

You can use it to pass a pid to keep the computer awake until that process completes. I use it for longer-running scripts that I don't want interrupted

That's mostly what `caffeinate your-script` is for.

I would like to also recommend the app:

   hear (macOS speech recognition and dictation via the command line)

See: https://sveinbjorn.org/hear

(Uses built-in macOS capabilities for transcription from audio to text.)

Its open source GitHub repo at https://github.com/sveinbjornt/hear

Man page at https://sveinbjorn.org/files/manpages/hear.1.html

> (Uses built-in macOS capabilities for transcription from audio to text.)

Question (to self, currently researching)... Which capabilities? Released when? I ask because Apple Intelligence has expanded the use of audio transcription features.

Answer: `hear` uses SFSpeechRecognizer [1] which has been available since macOS 10.15. I'm not yet sure how it relates to Apple Intelligence transcription services.

Note: "speech recognition is a network-based service" which perhaps suggests Apple Intelligence (the marketing term, not an Apple Developer term, I don't think) uses it as well

[1][ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/sfspeechrec...

I thought I recognized the name of the developer! The person that brought us Platypus! Nice.

I used Platypus to make my simple command line tools accessible to coworkers who considered the command line to be "too much" to learn. I've loved that app for close to two decades.

> which hear

> hear not found

macOS 15.1

Same, but there is the `say` command which you can cat a text file into and it will say it outloud

https://ss64.com/mac/say.html

Hear itself isn't a built-in utility.

> hear is a command line interface for the built-in speech recognition capabilities in macOS

Have you gone through the installation process? https://github.com/sveinbjornt/hear?tab=readme-ov-file#insta...

Someone needs to create a brew formula for `hear`.

The terminal version of Disk Utility is actually much better than the GUI (it doesn't hang and the app is glitchy.

Docs are at https://ss64.com/mac/diskutil.html

`pdisk` might be more convenient if you've worked with `gdisk` on ArchLinux

https://manpagez.com/man/8/pdisk/

diskutil does more than edit partitions, though.

If you have a modern Mac you have very little business using `pdisk`. It is only for editing disks mapped with an “Apple Partion Map”. This is obsolete replaced in practice by GPT on modern apple machines.

`gdisk` supports GPT, but to partition system SSD you need to deactivate System Integrity Protection:

    gdisk /dev/disk0

Or "man diskutil"

Disk Utility used to be excellent, a model of how an app should be. But then they rewrote it in Swift and now it's just bad.

Apple promotes Swift heavily but the results are not really encouraging. I don't think the "so-so" results are entirely because of Swift (probably due to newer, less battle tested software and also newer/younger devs) but still the fact is, all the not-so-great new software from Apple came with Swift rewrites, hard to not make a connection...

I have known the UI bring bad in general and I think it has more due to APFS… I used to be able to do backups but APFS is so different to everything else that at this point I wish Apple switched to ZFS but honestly that wasn’t gonna happen after the buyout of Sun to oracle .

https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/18ez5b0/why_disk_utili...

AFPS is more complex yes, and it's sad they let down Time Machine (somewhat) with it, considering the capabilities. But that's pretty much on point with current Apple, they would rather have you pay for iCloud "backup" than make an individual/personal solution that doesn't require subscription to their services.

It's a bit sad because the whole point of Apple was, "we are not IBM" after the PC got its start. They are very much IBM now.

As for ZFS, it has its use for sure (servers) but it's very heavy on ressource and very complex. I don't think it's just because of the buyout of Sun, overall, it's just overkill for a personal computer; and since Apple completely left the server market, even for SMBs, there is no real reason to push for it.

In the end it's not really about any filesystem, the problem is mostly that Apple is not a user focused company as much as it used to be. They could make better technical UI/Apps/Solutions but they don't care that much, they make too much money selling gadgets (those are good but really not the same thing as "proper" computers).

I wish iCloud backup was a true backup. It's really a sync, so if you accidentally rm -rf a file well you better hope you can yank out your Ethernet cable in time (or turn off wifi)

Well they do have a backup functionality, aptly named "iCloud Backup" but that's only on iOS. It's very frustrating because they are always in a rush to copy the worsts parts of iOS/iPhone for the Mac but they don't care much about bringing the good thing as long as it doesn't make them that much money.

I guess the rational is that if you have a Mac you also have an iPhone and your important data is already on your phone and thus already in a backup.

In theory they also have a file history for iCloud and you could restore files for up to 30 days, I think. I say in theory because the few times I have tried it, it was incredibly unhelpful. But that's pretty much usual with Apple, the practice is actually very far for the theory/marketing.

Apple wanted a unified format for all of their devices; you’re not going to run ZFS on a watch, phone, set top box or headset.

> all the not-so-great new software from Apple came with Swift rewrites, hard to not make a connection...

That's a leap, but I understand your point of course. It _MIGHT_ also be said it all came from ObjectiveC experts having a first go at Swift, too. Or from groups that were run by some common set of "get it out the door" middle management types.

Or any of a thousand reasons.

Yes I thought about that possibility too, but I believe most of the Objective-C old school expert are mostly gone from Apple. It makes sense when you look at the timelines, people that were there for the early Mac days are just hitting retirement age. Most of the executives have been replaced in one way or another, that's an indication.

And of course, Apple has a middle management problem, but that comes with Tim Cook's style; he cares about values that are just not conductive to progress and excellence. It all ends up about "getting shit done" and not caring that much if the results are actually any good. So, they do stuff on schedule and are content with it no matter how bad it is, typical careerist behavior.

To be fair, a lot of our modern society seems to have been overtaken by these types of people, they are very popular and very "successful"; it's more noticeable at Apple because it used to be very different...

This article contains links to https://ss64.com/ , which is an amazing resource that I wish I'd known about sooner!

100% That's why I made it a point to share that page.

I still get a ton of mileage from reading the macOS How-to page https://ss64.com/mac/syntax.html

Thanks for the kind words, I'll be scanning this thread to see if there's anything new that I've missed.

If you want the least useful macOS commandline utility, 'pdisk' is:

     "...a menu driven program which partitions disks using the standard
     Apple disk partitioning scheme described in "Inside Macintosh: Devices".
     It does not support the Intel/DOS partitioning scheme[.]"

Although not built in, we have a list of easy to install command-line utilities for macOS.

https://terminaltrove.com/categories/macos/

You might find one you've never heard of that is useful! :)

I found a tool of mine submitted by someone else on the site (pleasant surprise!) and I want to update the description and add a more recent/better image. How would I do that?

Send us a message, we will update it very quickly!

https://terminaltrove.com/about/

Kinda related: does anyone else regularly finds CLI tools, installs them and never ever even call them once?

Ha, when I search through my history I usually find I ran them exactly once, right after installing, and then forgot all about them. But there are some exceptions, I often use httpie instead of curl, MTR is great, I am liking doggo instead of dig...

That's the difference between recall memory and recognition memory. The GUI took off because we can recognize a menu and easily figure out where we need to go, versus having to memorize obscure and cryptic commands. Honestly having a LLM spit out command line arguments is probably the best way forward if things don't have a GUI.

It happens but Ctrl-R has helped me get much better at finding commands I’ve used even just once before based on some tiny thing I remember about them.

Yes, been there, forgot that. I have since created a shell helper function that prints a list of "new and cool" CLI tools that I recently added to my dotfiles setup, which helps me committing them to long-term memory.

This looks like a list of cross-platform command line tools. What about it is Mac-specific?

Related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36491704 "macOS command-line tools you might not know about"

It's probably been written about a lot of places already.

For me, increasing the number of icons in the launcher grid was very useful.

After running these three commands, the size of the Launcher will be set to 13x8 apps:

    defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-columns -int 13
    defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 8
    defaults write com.apple.dock ResetLaunchPad -bool TRUE; killall Dock

In general, a lot of parameters of different applications can be changed via command `defaults`

https://macos-defaults.com/

To get a complete list of parameters, you can execute

    defaults read

$ say Hello

To scare your teammates when you are logged in remotely optionally with

$ osascript -e "set volume output volume 100"

Not a command, but a little known feature of the Terminal app:

(shift+command+K) or Menu 'Shell' -> 'New Remote Connection...'

opens a SSH, S(FTP), TELNET connection manager window!

Sort of like command+k in the Finder, connects to a server. You can type in vnc://host or vnc://localhost:port... the latter is for VNC to hosts via an SSH tunnel.

It's quite a good VNC client, too.

And sometimes handy: shift+cmd+. to toggle showing hidden (dot) files in Finder.

It's too bad this doesn't use .ssh/config

As they seem to have removed Bluetooth Explorer and all ways to get diagnostic info about the bluetooth system and/or change codecs and settings, does anybody know any good cmdline ways in later mac osxes to do the same?

For example I'm having a problem that comes and goes now and then where Bluetooth audio is 300 ms delayed compared to the video playback everywhere except in Youtube on Safari, very strange. It's good for a few months then suddenly it becomes unusable, then back to zero sync delay after a few months.

I was thinking this might be related to CODEC selections etc or some hidden setting that might get changed which we normally aren't allowed to determine :)

(btw I know there is a difference between latency and synchronization - latency might be unavoidable but video sync should always be able to compensate - I got curious on how exactly that works, where in the app / SDK / OS pipeline does the a/v sync happen on a Mac?)

See: https://chatgpt.com/share/672b94e1-4c20-8001-aea9-9371b4e9d9...

Also: https://github.com/toy/blueutil

Thanks.. but that github program only lists the same info you get if you command-click on the BT icon in the menu bar. It basically only shows the device name.

I guess filtering the streaming log entries in the Console app gives some info.

  nc(1) - netcat, arbitrary TCP and UDP connections and listens

  networkQuality - Speed test + network stress tool.

  system_profiler(8) - Useful way to grab extensive system information in shell scripts.

  wdutil(8) - wdutil provides functionality of the Wireless Diagnostics application in
     command line form.

networkQuality is in the article.

TinkerTool provides a GUI that runs some useful commands under the hood

https://www.bresink.com/osx/0TinkerTool/download.php

One-liner for previewing a file with Quick Look. I aliased this to `ql` :)

    qlmanage -p $argv >/dev/null 2>&1

I'm curious if there's a way to do this with standard input instead of having to supply a filename?

I do this with man pages but it opens up in a full Preview window, not QuickLook.

You can use process substitution[0] to have a command output act as a file:

  qlmanage -p <(man man) >/dev/null 2>&1

0 - https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Process-S... (it works in zsh too, but bash manual explains this feature more clearly)

It misses the most important of them all, if you are used to copy content to usb drive for reading on a multimedia player : dot_clean -m

To find what causes your laptop drains its battery, you can use

    sudo powermetrics

Thanks Spotify:

coreaudiod is using very high CPU at 111.90 ms/s

I'm on a 16" M1 Macbook Pro 16 gig.

If spotify use the coreaudio daemon for the decoding it can be spotify's fault for this CPU usage, don't you think ?

Maybe they are using it "wrong" but Apple Music isn't exactly light on ressource either...

I'll add `plutil` to the list. It's great for reading plist files, but did you know it can parse json too?

/usr/bin/plutil -extract your.key.path raw -o - - <<< "$jsoninput"

(obviously, less useful now that `jq`is built in)

    ; which jq
    /usr/bin/jq
    ; jq
    jq - commandline JSON processor [version 1.6-159-apple-gcff5336-dirty]

Wow. When did `jq` start shipping by default? TIL

Starting in macOS 15, it was quietly included.

Glad to spread the good word ;)

> obviously, less useful now that `jq`is built in

Hold up, what?

Looks like the site's down.

https://archive.is/kGmn6

Thanks for the heads up! It should be back up now

sips https://ss64.com/mac/sips.html

I have thousands of old photos that preview can open, but I can’t upload them into the photo.app because the file format is wrong. I’m going to try and use SIPS to convert them all into png first and then add to photo.app. Thanks for this pointer.

Similarly, I've had trouble getting audio files into a format that the Books app understands (for ebooks), until I found

   afconvert -v -s 3 -f m4bf filename.mp3

sips looks really cool, thanks for pointing this out.

Not gonna lie, I missed this because I thought it was related to macOS SIP, System Integrity Protection. Which is something I am deeply uninterested in.

Nice. After reading the man page, I see that it can be used to convert image file formats:

    sips -s format png photo.HEIC --out photo.png

or resizing:

    sips -z 300 600 original.jpg --out new.jpg

That's cool. I wish it could convert webp images.

It can, but only from webp, not to.

I've never heard of networkQuality, that's seems like quite a useful tool.

For reference, it’s been there since macOS 12. You may also like to know that this year (macOS 15) they added jq.

I didn't know that, thanks!

Unfortunately, it's not actually very useful, as whatever server they're using on the other end is severely constrained. networkQuality gives me:

Downlink: 884.856 Mbps, 198 RPM - Uplink: 13.238 Mbps, 198 RPM

whereas speedtest (whether to the official speedtest server OR a friend's home server in their basement!) gives ~700 Mbps uplink.

try

  networkQuality -s

That's a more apples to apples comparison to speedtest.net; Separate upload and download tests.

Somewhat better, 867/114, but still not the symmetric I get on typical real workloads.

Here's a handy use I've found for mdfind.

Say you've got a directory that has scripts or data files related to some thing you do. For example I've got several scripts that I use when I scan books with my book scanner. I only need these when doing book scanning stuff so don't want to put them somewhere in $PATH. I want to be able to easily run them from scripts that aren't in that directory, but I don't want to hard code the path to that directory.

Solution: in the directory with the book scanning scripts I make a file named ID that contains a unique string. I currently use 16 byte random hex strings [1].

I have this script, named find-dir-by-ID, somewhere in $PATH:

  #!/bin/zsh
  ID=${1:?Must specific ID}
  IDSHA=`echo $ID | shasum | cut -d ' ' -f 1`
  mdfind $ID 2>/dev/null | grep /ID | while read F; do
      FSHA=`shasum $F | cut -d ' ' -f 1`
      if [ $IDSHA = $FSHA ]; then
          dirname $F
          exit 0
      fi
  done
  exit 1

If some script wants to use scripts from my book scanning script directory, it can do this:

  SCRIPT_DIR=`find-dir-by-ID 54f757919a5ede5961291bec27b15827`
  if [ ! -d $SCRIPT_DIR ]; then
    >&2 echo Cannot find book scanning scripts
    exit 1
  fi

and then SCRIPT_DIR has the full path to the scanning script directory.

The IDs do not have to be hex strings. If I'd thought about it more I probably would have made IDs look like this "book-scanning:54f757919a5ede59" or "arduino-tools:3b6b4f47bf803663".

[1] here's a script for that:

  #!/bin/sh
  N=${1:-8} # number of bytes
  xxd -g $N -c $N -p -l $N < /dev/urandom

Why not just a directory with subdirectories by ID? No mdfind needed, no problems with just-created directories, no wait, etc

You mean something like having ~/well-known-stuff and under that having a 54f757919a5ede5961291bec27b15827 directory with the book scanning scripts and so on?

That could work fine, but generally the directories I've used this on are directories that I want to have somewhere else, and with a reasonable name. Usually the directories came first and various other things in fixed relative positions were using them, and then later I wanted to use them from elsewhere and added the ID.

I suppose ~/well-known/stuff/54f757919a5ede5961291bec27b15827 could by a symbolic link to the original.

The mdfind approach does have the advantage that if I reorganize things and move the directory it keeps working.

Beyond opaqueness, which could be overcome by simply prefixing the ID with something descriptive, I guess it helps avoid creating excessively long paths that might create problem onncertain filesystems, which is rarely a problem these days, but I have been bitten by it a half dozen times over the last few years. In a couple instances causing (recoverable) data loss.

There is also pmset which is very useful (since macOS doesn't give a UI counterpart) https://support.apple.com/en-am/guide/mac-help/mchl40376151/...

Oh this is pretty neat, thanks for sharing!

https://ss64.com/mac/pmset.html

I have this .zshrc function to track the battery and charging, which uses pmset:

    function batt-info() {
        echo
        system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep Wattage | cut -c 7-
        echo
        pmset -g batt
    }

I've found reliably "turning on" with pmset to be hit or miss. I can't remember the gotcha I ran into if it was that you had to have your laptop lid open or something else...

Yes. If macOS is asleep or idle, pmset won't get triggered. It is best used with caffeinate. I used it for a museum installation where every night I'd turn it off before they cut the electricity and turn it on in the morning just after electricity is switched back on: it was a way for me to be in peace with my conscience (though after some tests, the mac didn't bother getting switched off by cutting out the electricity).

My non-built-in CLI utility recommendations, none of which are macOS specific:

* atuin - TUI for shell history, backed by SQLite - https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin

* LSD (LSDeluxe) - rewrite of `ls` - https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd

* ripgrep - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

* fzf - command-line fuzzy finder that enhances file search, command history search, and more - https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Notes:

- To get pretty extra file/folder symbols with LSD, you'll probably need to install some special fonts.

- You can use `fzf` and `ripgrep` together.

I can vouch for fzf being a game-changer if you spend a lot of time in the CLI

My problem with fzf is that it's so broadly useful that I forget it exists.

pbcopy and pbpaste are handy, for a version that works over ssh connections there is osc: https://github.com/theimpostor/osc

since I switch between linux and macos a lot I wrote a dotfile function called "clip" that will work the same on both. nice thing is it will automatically paste if nothing is piped to it to copy so there's no need to use separate commands... although I just realized it might be nice to have a "passthrough" mode that both copies and pastes if you add this to a pipeline in order to capture some intermediate part to the clipboard

    if [[ "$(uname)" == "Darwin" ]]; then
      clip() {
        [ -t 0 ] && pbpaste || pbcopy
      }
    else # assume linux if not macos
      clip() {
        [ -t 0 ] && xclip -o -selection clipboard || xclip -selection clipboard
      }
    fi

That's handy, thanks! `osc copy` may also take args for files to copy to the clipboard, but in the absence of that and no data on stdin it maybe should switch to paste.

I went the route of managing a different set of dotfiles for linux and macOS. Same repository, just different branches.

Also, falling back to using oh-my-zsh functionality.

I copied this functionality to linux it's been so useful.

At my job I have to work with a lot of JSON that's usually minimized. This command has single-handedly saved my sanity:

$ pbpaste | jq | pbcopy

Then I can paste it into whatever text editor I want and it's all nice & pretty-printed for me.

Bonus is that I don't have to change the command at all, just copy the minimized JSON to the clipboard (say from DBeaver, for example), then hit the 'up' arrow and enter.

I never knew that jq without any arguments pretty-printed JSON. Very useful, and great tip to combine with pbcopy/pbpaste.

Copying using OSC52 is great! I have a cross-platform shell function for that in my bashrc [1], as well as an implementation that works in vim [2].

[1]: https://github.com/DvdGiessen/dotfiles/blob/2c02332b4a657690... [2]: https://github.com/DvdGiessen/dotfiles/blob/2c02332b4a657690...

And for those of us who have to support macOS users:

   sw_vers (to display the version/build of macOS),

   dsenableroot (to enable the root user), and

   say "phrase" (useful for freaking out users over a remote SSH connection)

Great tip about the `security` command, a new one for me.

I got this trick from someone on the Internet:

$> long_running_command && say "Witness me, for I am done"

Yep, I do this in a tmux session. But sometimes I'm on a call and forget and the ROBOT VOICE says "DATABASE DUMP IS COMPLETE" and I jump out of my skin.

A fun easter egg in the "say" command is that "OS X" is said as "Oh Ess Ten".

You can also change voices with -v. My favorite is "cellos" since it sings to you.

Not sure that's an easter egg? That's been the pronunciation for 25 years.

It's at least manually programmed in. Otherwise it would have said 'Ecks'

It actually understands roman numerals, to a certain extent. E.g. `say LVIII` will say "58". However, `say MCMLXXIX` speaks some gibberish that ends in the word "six", for some reason.

It also knows how to say numbers up into the trillions but not more than that (although I feel like it used to).

Other cute `say` tricks: muck around with OSX Default Speech Voice (to a siri-ish voice) and you can invoke that from the CLI.

I hacked together a little script for demo recording like:

    START_FROM="$1"
    STARTED=0
    function transcript() {
       ID="$1"
       TO_SAY="$2"
       if [[ ...STARTED || START_FROM && ID... ]]; then
          STARTED=1
          say "$TO_SAY"
       fi
    }

    transcript "STEP001" "This is a test"
    transcript "STEP001b" "of the emergency broadcast system"
    transcript "STEP002" "This is only a test, if this was ..."
    transcript "STEP003" "...etc..."

...and then I have a hardcoded `--output` which will then change the invocation to `say -o "$ID.wav" "$TO_SAY"` and output audio files.

That way I can iterate on voiceover scripts, eg: `./demo-script "STEP002"` => `./demo-script --output`

It's really helpful for iterating on pronunciations, eg: `transcript "STEP005" "In case of Four Hundred and Four errors..."`, I can just "skip to" and iterate against that line (and subsequent ones), or "skip back" and hear it in more of a flowing context.

...even if I don't end up using the `say`-generated audio, having a transcript (and even pacing) that I can just read through with my own voice is super helpful.

Since Apple spent so much effort in getting certified:

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

These are all guaranteed to work:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/

(I may not have linked to the precisely correct version.)

plutil. Maybe not that useful to a lot of people but I have been going through and collecting bookmarks and Safari bookmarks are binary files. plutil is a means of converting the binary property file to a json or xml file.

https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/plutil.1.html

Want to scan the local wifi networks from the command line, and get useful information like signal strength?

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -s

I set a shell alias so I can just do `airport -s`. I've no idea why this is hidden away inside some framework and not in a directory which is in the normal path, but there you go.

FWIW that appears to be soon deprecated according to MacOS 15.2:

WARNING: The airport command line tool is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. For diagnosing Wi-Fi related issues, use the Wireless Diagnostics app or wdutil command line tool.

Oh, that's a pity. I'm pretty bad at keeping up to date on MacOS releases, but I should probably start figuring out `wdutil` so that my muscle memory is adapted before I've got no choice!

is there a way to do monitor mode scanning with wdutil like the `airport -s` command? asking for a friend...

mdls shows a file's metadata.

I use it most often for pulling lat lon data from photos.

What I'm really missing still is a cli to iCloud stored passwords. AFAIK 'security' cli can't access the credentials stored in the cloud. This would be helpful to store secrets outside of git but would still allow scriptable access to them similarly as 1password cli 'op' has.

Time Machine utility, examine and manipulate Time Machine backups, restore data from backups, add or remove exclusions, and compare backups

https://ss64.com/mac/tmutil.html

I maintain a more comprehensive list here: https://notes.billmill.org/computer_usage/mac_os/mac_os_comm...

But I don’t have uuidgen!

I'm fascinated by "sips" which has a full JavaScript interpreter built into it for rendering images using an entirely undocumented (as far as I can tell) Canvas-like API: https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/sips

fs_usage is my favourite - find out what's thrashing the disk. (Usually Spotlight or Spark...)

Does anyone remember the shortcut that brings up a list of currently available keyboard shortcuts for the current app? It may not be built-in, in which case it was a free utility.

Cheatsheet? I've used it for years. Just hold down Command for a few seconds to see a list of all available shortcut keys in the current app.

https://www.mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/feedNotes.php

https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/cheatsheet

Looks like a lot of these have linux equivalents that could be aliased. I wonder if anyone's made a set of those for regular macos users who occasionally use something else.

> If you store your secrets in the Keychain (and you should!)

As part of the OS, Keychain suffers from the same sorts of sharp edges as using a built-in interpreter. An alternative is to use a password manager. Below is an example of the tools available in one.

https://developer.1password.com/docs/cli/get-started/#step-1...

Would you mind expanding on what these "sharp edges" are that you're warning about? I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Keychain has served me (and I imagine many others) really well for a while.

I actual wrote a similar post a while back: https://www.chriswales.uk/blog/my-favourite-macos-terminal-c...

networksetup was one of my favourites as well as du and caffeinate.

The 'security' command is new to me so thanks!

    locate

https://ss64.com/mac/locate.html

locate searches a database for all pathnames which match the specified pattern. The database is recomputed periodically, (about once a week) and contains the path-names of all files which are publicly accessible.

The database is not set up by default.

Your better bet on MacOS is to use `mdfind -name ....`

I have that aliased to `locate` on mine. It's not exactly the same but it gets me 99% of the way there.

I just remembered at a previous job where we were always paired and used team rather than individual iMacs for development that as a prank I ssh’d into the other iMac from my team and periodically would run open on a random URL which caused a Safari window to mysteriously pop up their system.

pbcopy and pbpaste are among my top commandline utilities. If you are running linux in WSL, you can add the following to you path to recreate their functionality:

    # pbpaste
    #!/bin/bash
    # Adapted from https://www.techtronic.us/pbcopy-pbpaste-for-wsl/
    powershell.exe Get-Clipboard | sed 's/\r$//' | sed -z '$ s/\n$//'
    exit 0

and

    # pbcopy
    #!/bin/bash
    #Adapted from https://www.techtronic.us/pbcopy-pbpaste-for-wsl/
    <&0 clip.exe
    exit 0

I'm sure everyone knows this, but `open` has an equivalent on Linux: `xdg-open`.

Except xdg mime types are easily heist-able by programs and there is no universal truth for it.

Install vscode on Linux and have fun with it hijacking opening directories. Which is easy enough to fix (with a bit of know how) or work around but annoying.

MacOS is far from perfect but open always doing what I expect is a good example of what Apple did well.

Xcode opening all my JSON files is equally obnoxious. At least it is relatively easy to sort that out in macOS.

Good parallel.

Super easy to fix on macOS.

TIL: caffeinate

Very useful.

Indeed, many applications I would expect to prevent sleeping (some audio playback ones, games, etc.) don't implement this. I assume it's a case of Apple's APIs changing over the years and not everyone catching up/caring. At one point I had downloaded Amphetamine[^1] but it is much nicer to just use the terminal here.

[^1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704

Also https://github.com/newmarcel/KeepingYouAwake

The "newest" and still supported low level API is almost 14 years old: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/iokit/kiopmasserti... https://developer.apple.com/documentation/iokit/kiopmasserti...

I was able to install a `caffeine` package with Apt on Linux. In that one the `caffeinate` command is supposed to be run with another command. While the `caffeine` command does what macOs `caffeinate` does.

For a GUI version, Amphetamine is quite nice (and free). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12

yes amphetamine I use regularly when I want to charge my android phone during travel with lid closed.

That's interesting, I have never needed to do that. My Pixels have always just charged even if the lid is closed, on Intel and Apple Silicon machines. I like to travel light so I often use my laptop as a battery bank instead of carrying a seperate one.

It would be cool to have this activate when a Jupyter notebook is currently running a cell, and deactivate automatically when its finished.

This can be done by passing a PID. I believe there are other options, as well. (Not at my computer to look it up right now.) I haven't used those features "manually", but I have in scripts that I expect to generate long-running processes.

While it may avoid sleep, it doesn’t prevent inactivity, in my experience. For instance, my chat app at work will still show me inactive while running caffeinate. I have to do non-interactive training semi-regularly and need to interact to keep from looking like I’m away from my desk.

Have you used the `-u` flag? From the manual:

  -u      Create an assertion to declare that user is active.

Doesn’t work with Slack at least. I’ve had an iTerm window running `caffeinate -disu` for years. I think it used to work and stopped working in the last few months.

There is also 'say' which is great if you need to step away from a long running command, in a similar fashion to ringing the terminal bell but with more context.

That's in there.

afconvert is pretty nifty for audio format conversion.

is it better than ffmpeg in any way?

Apple's AAC encoders are often touted as being the 'best', quality-wise: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,119876.0.html

As jammmety said; for AAC encoding yes, but don't worry - you can have ffmpeg use that encoder to get the best of both.

afconvert is the only way I've managed to turn mp3s into something that Books would accept as an audiobook.

    afconvert -v -s 3 -f m4bf ....mp3

upgrade_mac.sh: https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/u... :

  upgrade_macos() {
    softwareupdate --list
    softwareupdate --download
    softwareupdate --install --all --restart
  }

https://ss64.com/mac/

cliclick[1] is useful for gap-filling the AppleScript accessibility APIs when automating poorly-behaved applications.

[1] https://github.com/BlueM/cliclick

"what other operating systems might call the "clipboard""

might

Other operating systems… including what was running on the Mac in 1984?

shameless plug for my mac lsblk port https://github.com/JakeTrock/gosblk

pbcopy is my favorite. Almost enough to prefer a mac over my usual linux stations, but you can get that on linux easy enough.

"I like to look at the list of macOS Bash commands."

Sigh. These are shell commands, not "Bash commands".

These are programs, not shell commands.

Even calling them "zsh commands" would have been more accurate.

If you're going to correct someone snarkily, don't make a similar mistake...

stoked they baked in caffeine to macos, such a useful utility.

How about launchctl

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