OS X Tricks
The information below has been gathered over the years from various sources, mostly other people’s blogs. There’s really nothing new here, but I have found them so helpful on so many occasions that I thought I should re-share them with the world. If you have any other helpful OS X tips or tricks, please feel free to share them in the comments.
Finding Files With Find
To find all files in the current directory or any sub-directories that was modified within the last hour:
find . -mtime -1h
To find all files on the file system modified more than one day ago:
find / -mtime +1
(The default unit of time is days.)
Here is one example of using find - with the exec option to run some utility on each file:
find . -name "*.zip" -exec unzip {} \;
Actually, the example above isn’t that good, because the -exec option is really meant as a way to run a utility that will execute some kind of test on the file and return true or false, which is an indicator to the find command about whether or not that file should be included in the result set. Strictly speaking the test should not really manipulate the file and doing so is really a side effect.
The correct way to do the above unzip function would be as follows (the 0 is a zero):
find . -name "*.zip" -print0 | xargs -0 unzip
To delete all files within a directory structure that match a certain pattern, use this:
find . -name "._*" -delete
Or, using xargs:
find . -name "._*" | xargs rm {}
Note that the example above was required on a Debian box to remove the attribute files that got extracted from a tar file created on a Mac. OS X stores additional file information in extended attributes that (A) aren’t very well documented and (B) annoying, because they result in all sorts of junky files being created on non-Mac volumes and (C) hard to get rid of. Mostly these are used to store the origin of a file (eg. some web site, Time Machine backup, etc) and whether or not you have approved the viewing of that file.
To view extended attributes, use:
ls -l@
Thankfully, someone wrote a small script that will clean the attributes off every file in the current directory and below:
for i in $(ls -Rl@ | grep ’^ ’ | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u); \
do echo echo Removing $i ... >&2; \
find . | xargs xattr -d $i 2>/dev/null ; done
The space after the caret is a tab, created by typing Control-V then pressing tab in vi.
Following on from the previous example, we can use a similar loop to power a grep command. This command creates a script that looks for occurrences of each string in the file ../blah.txt in all folders in the current folder:
for i in $(cat ../blah.txt ); do echo echo Processing $i...; grep -l $i *; done
If you are trying to find out which files a particular system function or application is modifying, a simple (albeit imperfect) solution is to create a timestamp file and then use the find command to list all files modified since that the timestamp:
cd ~ sudo -s touch now # At this point you carry out the function you are testing find -x / -newer timestamp
Improving Finder
To prevent Finder (and some other internal processes) from creating .DS_Store files on network shares, issue the following command:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
killall Finder
To add the current folder to the title bar of a Finder window:
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES killall Finder
The above command is particularly useful because the additional information occupies an otherwise empty part of the window. Hence you get additional information without the window requiring more space.
To make Tweetbot show the actual URLs embedded in Tweets rather than the t.co URL:
defaults write com.tapbots.TweetbotMac OpenURLsDirectly YES
Other Cool Stuff
Unfortunately there is no “pause” command in OS X, but this will work just as well:
read -p "Press any key to continue..."
To run a command on OS X and have the output redirected to a process on another machine (via SSH), do something like this:
tar czf - somedir | ssh james@kong "cat > incoming.tgz"
Even cooler: to re-start an aborted SCP transfer on a non-standard port using rsync:
rsync --partial --progress -e 'ssh -p PORT' user@host:/remotesrcfilename localdestfilename
The above was tested on Snow Leopard to complete an aborted transfer from Snow Leopard Server.
To manually add an SSH key with a passphrase to the Keychain:
ssh-add -K .ssh/id_rsa
To create a RAM disk:
diskutil erasevolume HFS+ "ramdisk" `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://4629672`;ln -s /Volumes/ramdisk ~/ram
To remove the disk (assuming its the only one you’ve created):
hdiutil detach /dev/disk1
This will probably work on Linux too, but this tip landed in here because I used it to copy a Time Machine backup folder, which includes loads of symbolic links, to another hard drive. The problem is that the cp command doesn’t copy links, it copies the files they point to. Given the clever way in which Time Machine saves files (ie. if a file hasn’t changed since the previous backup it simply writes a symbolic link instead of another copy of the file), using cp to copy a backup database would require about 10 times as much space as the original file system.
So the solution is to use the tar command, but, of course, you want to try and avoid creating an intermediate tar file if at all possible. So piping the stream from one tar process to another does the trick. The syntax that I used to duplicate a Time Machine backup folder was as follows:
cd destination_folder
tar cp /Volumes/Time Machine Backup/Backups.backupdb/machine_name | tar xvf -
The reason you need to change to the destination folder is because the second tar process will proceed to untar its input immediately.
When setting up a new Mac Mini Server, you may want to reconfigure the two drives to create a RAID-1 array (mirrored drives).
The way to do this is:
- Start the remote install application on another Mac
- Boot up whilst holding down the Option key
- Choose to boot up off the remote disk
- Once it has booted up (and this takes a while) start a terminal prompt and issue the commands provided here: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2010/07/17/enabling-raid-1-on-a-mac-mini-server/
- This might NOT actually result in the mirror being rebuilt, so after you’ve rebooted and gone through the set-up process, remember to go into Disk Utility and check the status of the array.
Macports Stuff
To update Macports:
sudo port selfupdate
Then:
sudo port upgrade outdated
To see installed ports:
port installed
To remove inactive ports:
sudo port uninstall inactive
To view unused dependencies:
port echo leaves
To remove unused dependencies:
sudo port uninstall leaves
To see the variants for a port:
port variants ffmpeg
To add a variant to an already installed port:
port install ffmpeg +nonfree
