Command Line For Mac
- Mac Commands List
- Mac Command Line List
- Command Line For Mac Address
- Svn Command Line For Mac
- Command Line For Mac Address
- Command Line For Macbook Pro
The Terminal app allows you to control your Mac using a command prompt. Why would you want to do that? Well, perhaps because you’re used to working on a command line in a Unix-based system and prefer to work that way. Terminal is a Mac command line interface. There are several advantages to using Terminal to accomplish some tasks — it’s usually quicker, for example. In order to use it, however, you’ll need to get to grips with its basic commands and functions. Once you’ve done that, you can dig deeper and learn more commands and use your Mac’s command prompt for more complex, as well as some fun, tasks.
Curated Mac apps that keep your Mac’s performance under control. Avoid Terminal commands, avoid trouble.
On a Mac, the default command line application is Terminal. There are also a number of other emulators out there but overall Terminal provides a very similar look and feel to the shell you are used to in Linux. This tutorial describes how to make use of the macOS Terminal to make your life easier and less frustrating. What Apple calls the Terminal is what Linux people call the shell (more specifically, the Bash shell). It’s also called a command-line terminal, abbreviated as CLI.
Download FreeHow to open Terminal on Mac
The Terminal app is in the Utilities folder in Applications. To open it, either open your Applications folder, then open Utilities and double-click on Terminal, or press Command - spacebar to launch Spotlight and type 'Terminal,' then double-click the search result.
You’ll see a small window with a white background open on your desktop. In the title bar are your username, the word 'bash' and the dimensions of the window in pixels. Bash stands for 'Bourne again shell'. There are a number of different shells that can run Unix commands, and on the Mac Bash is the one used by Terminal.
If you want to make the window bigger, click on the bottom right corner and drag it outwards. If you don’t like the black text on a white background, go to the Shell menu, choose New Window and select from the options in the list.
If Terminal feels complicated or you have issues with the set-up, let us tell you right away that there are alternatives. MacPilot allows to get access to over 1,200 macOS features without memorizing any commands. Basically, a third-party Terminal for Mac that acts like Finder.
For Mac monitoring features, try iStat Menus. The app collects data like CPU load, disk activity, network usage, and more — all of which accessible from your menu bar.
Basic Mac commands in Terminal
The quickest way to get to know Terminal and understand how it works is to start using it. But before we do that, it’s worth spending a little time getting to know how commands work. To run a command, you just type it at the cursor and hit Return to execute.
Every command is made up of three elements: the command itself, an argument which tells the command what resource it should operate on, and an option that modifies the output. So, for example, to move a file from one folder to another on your Mac, you’d use the move command 'mv' and then type the location of the file you want to move, including the file name and the location where you want to move it to.
Let’s try it.
Type cd ~/Documentsthen and press Return to navigate to your Home folder.
Type lsthen Return (you type Return after every command).
You should now see a list of all the files in your Documents folder — ls is the command for listing files.
To see a list of all the commands available in Terminal, hold down the Escape key and then press y when you see a question asking if you want to see all the possibilities. To see more commands, press Return.
Unix has its own built-in manual. So, to learn more about a command type man [name of command], where 'command' is the name of the command you want find out more about.
Terminal rules
There are a few things you need to bear in mind when you’re typing commands in Terminal, or any other command-line tool. Firstly, every character matters, including spaces. So when you’re copying a command you see here, make sure you include the spaces and that characters are in the correct case.
You can’t use a mouse or trackpad in Terminal, but you can navigate using the arrow keys. If you want to re-run a command, tap the up arrow key until you reach it, then press Return. To interrupt a command that’s already running, type Control-C.
Commands are always executed in the current location. So, if you don’t specify a location in the command, it will run wherever you last moved to or where the last command was run. Use the cdcommand, followed by a directory path, like in Step 1 above, to specify the folder where you want a command to run.
There is another way to specify a location: go to the Finder, navigate to the file or folder you want and drag it onto the Terminal window, with the cursor at the point where you would have typed the path.
Here’s another example. This time, we’ll create a new folder inside your Documents directory and call it 'TerminalTest.'
Open a Finder window and navigate to your Documents folder.
Type cd and drag the Documents folder onto the Terminal window.
Now, type mkdir 'TerminalTest'
Go back to the Finder, open Text Edit and create a new file called 'TerminalTestFile.rtf'. Now save it to the TerminalTest folder in your Documents folder.
In the Terminal window, type cd ~/Documents/TerminalTest then Return. Now type lsand you should see 'TerminalTestFile' listed.
To change the name of the file, type this, pressing Return after every step:
cd~/Documents/TerminalTest
mv TerminalTestFile TerminalTestFile2.rtf
That will change the name of the file to 'TerminalTestFile2'. You can, of course, use any name you like. The mv command means 'move' and you can also use it to move files from one directory to another. In that case, you’d keep the file names the same, but specify another directory before typing the the second instance of the name, like this:
mv ~/Documents/TerminalTest TerminalTestFile.rtf ~/Documents/TerminalTest2 TerminalTestFile.rtf
More advanced Terminal commands
Terminal can be used for all sorts of different tasks. Some of them can be performed in the Finder, but are quicker in Terminal. Others access deep-rooted parts of macOS that aren’t accessible from the Finder without specialist applications. Here are a few examples.
Mac Commands List
Copy files from one folder to another
In a Terminal window, type ditto [folder 1] [folder 1] where 'folder 1' is the folder that hosts the files and 'folder 2' is the folder you want to move them to.
To see the files being copied in the Terminal window, type -v after the command.
Download files from the internet
You’ll need the URL of the file you want to download in order to use Terminal for this.
cd ~/Downloads/
curl -O [URL of file you want to download]
If you want to download the file to a directory other than your Downloads folder, replace ~/Downloads/ with the path to that folder, or drag it onto the Terminal window after you type the cd command.
Change the default location for screenshots
If you don’t want macOS to save screenshots to your Desktop when you press Command-Shift-3, you can change the default location in Terminal
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location [path to folder where you want screenshots to be saved]
Hit Return
killall SystemUIServer
Hit Return
Change the default file type for screenshots
By default, macOS saves screenshots as .png files. To change that to .jpg, do this:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type JPG
Press Return
killall SystemUIServer
Press Return
Delete all files in a folder
The command used to delete, or remove, files in Terminal is rm. So, for example, if you wanted to remove a file in your Documents folder named 'oldfile.rtf' you’d use cd ~/Documents to go to your Documents folder then to delete the file. As it stands, that will delete the file without further intervention from you. If you want to confirm the file to be deleted, use -i as in rm -i oldfile.rtf
To delete all the files and sub-folders in a directory named 'oldfolder', the command is rm -R oldfolder and to confirm each file should be deleted, rm -iR oldfolder
Just because you can use Terminal to delete files on your Mac, doesn’t mean you should. It’s a relatively blunt instrument, deleting only those files and folders you specify.
Another way to free up space
If your goal in removing files or folders is to free up space on your Mac, or to remove junk files that are causing your Mac to run slowly, it’s far better to use an app designed for the purpose. CleanMyMac X is one such app.
It will scan your Mac for files and recommend which ones you can delete safely, as well as telling you how much space you’ll save. And once you’ve decided which files to delete, you can get rid of them in a click. You can download CleanMyMac here.
As you can see, while Terminal may look scary and seem like it’s difficult to use, it really isn’t. The key is learning a few commands, such as those we’ve outlined above, and getting to know the syntax for those commands.
However, you should be careful when using Terminal, it’s a powerful tool that has deep access to your Mac’s system files. Check commands by googling them if you’re not sure what they do. And if you need to delete files to save space, use an app like CleanMyMac X to do it. It’s much safer!
These might also interest you:
Historically, the command line interface provided a way to manipulate a computer over simple, text-based connections. In the modern era, in spite of the ability to transmit graphical user interfaces over the Internet, the command line remains a powerful tool for performing certain types of tasks.
As described previously in Before You Begin, most users interact with a command-line environment using the Terminal application, though you may also use a remote connection method such as secure shell (SSH). Each Terminal window or SSH connection provides access to the input and output of a shell process. A shell is a special command-line tool that is designed specifically to provide text-based interactive control over other command-line tools.
In addition to running individual tools, most shells provide some means of combining multiple tools into structured programs, called shell scripts (the subject of this book).
Different shells feature slightly different capabilities and scripting syntax. Although you can use any shell of your choice, the examples in this book assume that you are using the standard OS X shell. The standard shell is bash if you are running OS X v10.3 or later and tcsh if you are running an earlier version of the operating system.
The following sections provide some basic information and tips about using the command-line interface more effectively; they are not intended as an exhaustive reference for using the shell environments.
Note: This appendix was originally part of Mac Technology Overview.
Basic Shell Concepts
Before you start working in any shell environment, there are some basic features of shell scripting that you should understand. Some of these features are specific to OS X, but most are common to all platforms that support shell scripting.
Running Your First Command-Line Tool
In general, you run command-line tools that OS X provides by typing the name of the tool. (The syntax for running tools that you’ve added is described later in this appendix.)
For example, if you run the ls command, by default, it lists the files in your home directory. To run this command, type ls and press Return.
Most tools also can take a number of flags (sometimes called switches). For example, you can get a “long” file listing (with additional information about every file) by typing ls -l and pressing Return. The -l flag tells the ls command to change its default behavior.
Similarly, most tools take arguments. For example, to show a long listing of the files on your OS X desktop, type ls -l Desktop and press Return. In that command, the word Desktop is an argument that is the name of the folder that contains the contents of your OS X desktop.
In addition, some tools have flags that take flag-specific arguments in addition to the main arguments to the tool as a whole.
Specifying Files and Directories
Most commands in the shell operate on files and directories, the locations of which are identified by paths. The directory names that make up a path are separated by forward-slash characters. For example, the Terminal program is in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder at the top level of your hard drive. Its path is /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app.
The shell (along with, for that matter, all other UNIX applications and tools) also has a notion of a current working directory. When you specify a filename or path that does not start with a slash, that path is assumed to be relative to this directory. For example, if you type cat foo, the cat command prints the contents of the file foo in the current directory. You can change the current directory using the cd command.
Finally, the shell supports a number of directory names that have a special meaning.
Aug 14, 2011 Read reviews, compare customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about Pic Stitch - Collage Editor. Download Pic Stitch - Collage Editor and enjoy it. Pic stitch for mac. Jan 14, 2019 Pic Stitch for pc download. Pic Stitch is an app that not only applying filters to your photos but also allowing you to put them into collages. Actually, Pic Stitch is available for mobile platforms. Currently, a number of users want to be able to use Pic Stitch software on their pc, or on their Macs or Windows phone. And now is available for pc. Pic Stitch by Big Blue Clip LLC is a mobile app that was designed to help you stitch together multiple pictures into a collage. Although Pic Stitch for Mac is not available on the market, you can download other applications to create photo collages on Mac.
Table A-1 lists some of the standard shortcuts used to represent specific directories in the system. Because they are based on context, these shortcuts eliminate the need to type full paths in many situations.
Path string | Description |
|---|---|
| The For example, if you type |
| The For example, the path Note: Depending on the shell, if you follow a symbolic link into a subdirectory, typing |
| At the beginning of a path, the tilde character represents the home directory of the specified user, or the currently logged in user if no user is specified. (Unlike For example, you can refer to the current user’s The In OS X, the user’s home directory usually resides in the |
File and directory names traditionally include only letters, numbers, hyphens, the underscore character (_), and often a period (.) followed by a file extension that indicates the type of file (.txt, for example). Most other characters, including space characters, should be avoided because they have special meaning to the shell.
Although some OS X file systems permit the use of these other characters, including spaces, you must do one of the following:
“Escape” the character—put a backslash character (
) immediately before the character in the path.Add single or double quotation marks around the path or the portion that contains the offending characters.
For example, the path name My Disk can be written as 'My Disk', 'My Disk', or My Disk.
Single quotes are safer than double quotes because the shell does not do any interpretation of the contents of a single-quoted string. However, double quotes are less likely to appear in a filename, making them slightly easier to use. When in doubt, use a backslash before the character in question, or two backslashes to represent a literal backslash.
For more detailed information, see Quoting Special Characters in Flow Control, Expansion, and Parsing.
Accessing Files on Additional Volumes
On a typical UNIX system, the storage provided by local disk drives is presented as a single tree of files descending from a single root directory. This differs from the way the Finder presents local disk drives, which is as one or more volumes, with each volume acting as the root of its own directory hierarchy. To satisfy both worlds, OS X includes a hidden directory, Volumes, at the root of the local file system. This directory contains all of the volumes attached to the local computer.
To access the contents of other local (and many network) volumes, you prefix the volume-relative path with /Volumes/ followed by the volume name. For example, to access the Applications directory on a volume named MacOSX, you would use the path /Volumes/MacOSX/Applications.
Note: To access files on the boot volume, you are not required to add volume information, since the root directory of the boot volume is /. Including the volume information still works, though, so if you are interacting with the shell from an application that is volume-aware, you may want to add it, if only to be consistent with the way you access other volumes. You must include the volume information for all volumes other than the boot volume.
Input And Output
Most tools take text input from the user and print text out to the user’s screen. They do so using three standard file descriptors, which are created by the shell and are inherited by the program automatically. These standard file descriptors are listed in Table A-2.
File descriptor | Description |
|---|---|
| The standard input file descriptor is the means through which a program obtains input from the user or other tools. By default, this descriptor provides the user’s keystrokes. You can also redirect the output from files or other commands to |
| The standard output file descriptor is where most tools send their output data. By default, standard output sends data back to the user. You can also redirect this output to the input of other tools. |
| The standard error file descriptor is where the program sends error messages, debug messages, and any other information that should not be considered part of the program’s actual output data. By default, errors are displayed on the command line like standard output. The purpose for having a separate error descriptor is so that the user can redirect the actual output data from the tool to another tool without that data getting corrupted by non-fatal errors and warnings. |
To learn more about working with these descriptors, including redirecting the output of one tool to the input of another, read Shell Input and Output.
Terminating Programs
To terminate the currently running program from the command line, press Control-C. This keyboard shortcut sends an abort (ABRT) signal to the currently running process. In most cases this causes the process to terminate, although some tools may install signal handlers to trap this signal and respond differently. (See Trapping Signals in Advanced Techniques for details.)
In addition, you can terminate most scripts and command-line tools by closing a Terminal window or SSH connection. This sends a hangup (HUP) signal to the shell, which it then passes on to the currently running program. If you want a program to continue running after you log out, you should run it using the nohup command, which catches that signal and does not pass it on to whatever command it invokes.
Frequently Used Commands
Shell scripting involves a mixture of built-in shell commands and standard programs that run in all shells. Although most shells offer the same basic set of commands, there are often variations in the syntax and behavior of those commands. In addition to the shell commands, OS X also provides a set of standard programs that run in all shells.
Table A-3 lists some commands that are commonly used interactively in the shell. Most of the items in this table are not specific to any given shell. For syntax and usage information for each command, see the corresponding man page. For a more in-depth list of commands and their accompanying documentation, see OS X Man Pages.
Mac Command Line List
Command | Meaning | Description |
|---|---|---|
| (con)catenate | Prints the contents of the specified files to |
| change directory | Changes the current working directory to the specified path. |
| copy | Copies files (and directories, when using the -r option) from one location to another. |
| date | Displays the current date and time using the standard format. You can display this information in other formats by invoking the command with specific flags. |
| echo to output | Writes its arguments to |
| pager commands | Used to scroll through the contents of a file or the results of another shell command. This command allows forward and backward navigation through the text. The |
| List | Displays the contents of the specified directory (or the current directory if no path is specified). Pass the Pass the |
| Make Directory | Creates a new directory. |
| Move | Moves files and directories from one place to another. You also use this command to rename files and directories. |
| Open an application or file. | You can use this command to launch applications from Terminal and optionally open files in that application. |
| Print Working Directory | Displays the full path of the current directory. |
| Remove | Deletes the specified file or files. You can use pattern matching characters (such as the asterisk) to match more than one file. You can also remove directories with this command, although use of |
| Remove Directory | Deletes a directory. The directory must be empty before you delete it. |
Ctrl-C | Abort | Sends an abort signal to the current command. In most cases this causes the command to terminate, although commands may install signal handlers to trap this command and respond differently. |
Ctrl-Z | Suspend | Sends the SIGTSTP signal to the current command. In most cases this causes the command to be suspended, although commands may install signal handlers to trap this command and respond differently. Once suspended, you can use the |
Ctrl- | Quit | Sends the SIGQUIT signal to the current command. In most cases this causes the command to terminate, although commands may install signal handlers to trap this command and respond differently. |
Environment Variables
Some programs require the use of environment variables for their execution. Environment variables are variables inherited by all programs executed in the shell’s context. The shell itself uses environment variables to store information such as the name of the current user, the name of the host computer, and the paths to any executable programs. You can also create environment variables and use them to control the behavior of your program without modifying the program itself. For example, you might use an environment variable to tell your program to print debug information to the console.
To set the value of an environment variable, you use the appropriate shell command to associate a variable name with a value. For example, to set the environment variable MYFUNCTION to the value MyGetData in the global shell environment you would type the following command in a Terminal window:
When you launch an application from a shell, the application inherits much of its parent shell’s environment, including any exported environment variables. This form of inheritance can be a useful way to configure the application dynamically. For example, your application can check for the presence (or value) of an environment variable and change its behavior accordingly. Different shells support different semantics for exporting environment variables, so see the man page for your preferred shell for further information.
Child processes of a shell inherit a copy of the environment of that shell. Shells do not share their environments with one another. Thus, variables you set in one Terminal window are not set in other Terminal windows. Once you close a Terminal window, any variables you set in that window are gone.
Command Line For Mac Address
If you want the value of a variable to persist between sessions and in all Terminal windows, you must either add it to a login script or add it to your environment property list. See Before You Begin for details.
Similarly, environment variables set by tools or subshells are lost when those tools or subshells exit.
Running User-Added Commands
As mentioned previously, you can run most tools by typing their name. This is because those tools are located in specific directories that the shell searches when you type the name of a command. The shell uses the PATH environment variable to control where it searches for these tools. It contains a colon-delimited list of paths to search—/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin, for example.
If a tool is in any other directory, you must provide a path for the program to tell it where to find that tool. (For security reasons, when writing scripts, you should always specify a complete, absolute path.)
For security reasons, the current working directory is not part of the default search path (PATH), and should not be added to it. If it were, then another user on a multi-user system could trick you into running a command by adding a malicious tool with the same name as one you would typically run (such as the ls command) or a common misspelling thereof.
For this reason, if you need to run a tool in the current working directory, you must explicitly specify its path, either as an absolute path (starting from /) or as a relative path starting with a directory name (which can be the . directory). For example, to run the MyCommandLineProgram tool in the current directory, you could type ./MyCommandLineProgram and press Return.
With the aforementioned security caveats in mind, you can add new parts (temporarily) to the value of the PATH environment variable by doing the following:
If you want the additional path components to persist between sessions and in all Terminal windows, you must either add it to a login script or add it to your environment property list. See Before You Begin for details.
Running Applications
To launch an application, you can generally either:
Use the
opencommand.Run the application binary itself.
Type the pathname of the executable file inside the package.
Note: As a general rule, if you launch a GUI application from a script, you should run that script only within Terminal or another GUI application. You cannot necessarily launch an GUI application when logged in remotely (using SSH, for example). In general, doing so is possible only if you are also logged in using the OS X GUI, and in some versions of OS X, it is disallowed entirely.
Learning About Other Commands
At the command-line level, most documentation comes in the form of man pages (short for manual). Man pages provide reference information for many shell commands, programs, and POSIX-level concepts. The manual page manpages describes the organization of manual, and the format and syntax of individual man pages.
To access a man page, type the man command followed by the name of the thing you want to look up. For example, to look up information about the bash shell, you would type man bash. The man pages are also included in the OS X Developer Library (OS X Man Pages).
You can also search the manual pages by keyword using the apropos command.
Note: Not all commands and programs have man pages. For a list of available man pages, look in the /usr/share/man directory or see OS X Man Pages in the OS X Developer Library.
Most shells have a command or man page that displays the list of commands that are built into the shell (builtins). Table A-4 lists the available shells in OS X along with the ways you can access the list of builtins for the shell.
Shell | Command |
|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Svn Command Line For Mac
Command Line For Mac Address
Command Line For Macbook Pro
Copyright © 2003, 2014 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Policy Updated: 2014-03-10