osx

Command line

Processes

Disable Spotlight indexing because it steals all your damn CPU cycles

sudo mdutil -a -i off

CPU info, detailed

sysctl -a

Disk-related

Show the total size of the current directory (and all its subdirs)

du -c -h -s -c = grand total for all files -h = human-readable (KB, MB, GB, etc) -s = summarize = display only a total

Mounting an NTFS drive as read-write

sudo mount -v -t ntfs -o rw,auto,nobrowse /dev/disk3s1 /Volumes/Passport/

List all visible disks

diskutil list

Zeroing out a disk (safer than just formatting)

diskutil zeroDisk /dev/disk4

Misc

Location of iCloud Drive:

~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ Use this for command line access to pull/push files like any other directory. OSX will take care of getting it uploaded to iCloud.

Creating app-specific passwords when you have 2FA enabled

Ex usage: accessing an iCloud calendar with Amazon Alexa Log on to https://appleid.apple.com/. Navigate to Security --> App-specific Passwords --> Generate You may want to take a screenshot of the password that gets generated because you will never be able to see it again

Change a user's default shell

sudo chsh -s /path/to/shell username

Source: https://superuser.com/questions/379725/how-do-i-change-a-users-default-shell-in-osx

Add user to a group

sudo dscl . append /Groups/wheel GroupMembership $USER will add current user to "wheel" group

Homebrew - installer for all the good stuff

  • Install packages: brew install <package>

  • Search for specific packages: brew search [--desc] <search term or regex>

    Use ```--desc``` to search package description (and include in output), not just package title

  • Upgrade packages: brew upgrade

  • Upgrade one package: brew upgrade <package>

  • Getting help for any brew command: brew help <command>

More brew documentation available at https://docs.brew.sh

launchctl - Launch Control

Start, stop, enable, disable, unload from memory

See what services may be running

Just apple, or everything but apple

launchctl list |awk {'print $3'}|sort|grep apple
launchctl list |awk {'print $3'}|sort|grep -v apple

Turn off Symantec virus scanner until next reboot

launchctl stop com.symantec.uiagent.application.NFM
launchctl remove com.symantec.uiagent.application.NFM

Command line tools I should research further

ioreg - displays the I/O Kit registry. It shows the hierarchical registry structure as an inverted tree.

spctl - manages the security assessment policy subsystem.

Whatever that means.

You can checked whether user consent is enabled in general the following command:

spctl kext-consent status 

The result should be 

Kernel Extension User Consent: ENABLED

This can be done by a normal user and does not require sudo or booting in recovery mode. Note to make modifications, you have to boot into recovery mode, but the check can be done from a normally booted machine.

kextstat -- display status of loaded kernel extensions (kexts)

You can checked to see if the kext has been loaded using the command:

kextstat | grep silabs

This is an example showing the CP210xVCPDriver loaded:

  188    0 0xffffff7f83b8e000 0x9000     0x9000     com.silabs.driver.CP210xVCPDriver (5.0.5) AB2A33AD-B60D-35F9-A3F5-084252A66E50 <145 22 4 3>

Another useful command is

kextfind /Library/Extensions -loaded

This can show you the current user-approved extensions in case you want to look for potential conflicts.

Reference: Mentioned in https://www.silabs.com/community/interface/knowledge-base.entry.html/2018/03/30/usb_to_uart_bridgev-Dnef

“Use your macOS terminal shell to do awesome things”. https://github.com/herrbischoff/awesome-macos-command-line

dtruss - strace-ish tool

If you need to snoop on the activities of a command line tool, run dtruss <app> <app arguments>

Other tools are available from the DTrace package: execsnoop, iosnoop, iotop, opensnoop, rwsnoop, etc

OS X UI

Finder

Show/Hide hidden files

Shift + Cmd + .

Permanent delete one or more files

Option + Cmd + Delete

Empty trash

Shift + Cmd + Delete

System Preferences

Fix scrolling so it's correct (to me) and apparently unnatural (to Apple fans)

Trackpad --> Scroll & Zoom --> UNcheck "Scroll direction: Natural"

Enable SSH server

Sharing --> Remote login

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