MacTricksAndTips.com

Hey

I love Terminal. It ease of use and the raw power behind such a small little application. Anyway I have been looking on the internet during an hour of boredom to find cool and interesting commands which you can use in Terminal to show some cool statistics. This post sort of follows on from Playing Games In Terminal. These commands are designed to be low level and not very powerful. I have only posted a few, but if you do know any more please leave a comment below.

All of these commands are accessed by just typing the command in a Terminal window. A couple you will have to close out of to get back to a normal screen.

1) uptime

Very simple command that shows you the time your computer has been running as well as the load. The load when you read it is the amount of processes ready to run. You can read more about load on wikipedia.

2) top

Like Activity Monitor but from within Terminal. The top command shows you the top processes running on your computer. Not as efficient as Activity Monitor as the command does take up quite a bit of CPU. You can read more on this command here.

3) netstat

Quite an interesting command. It shows you all of the active TCP and UDP network connections on your computer. A very powerful little tool. If you just type netstat it will show what connections have been made. But if you type netstat -w 1 (with the spaces) it will update and show you statistics based on the connections you are currently running. If you head over to wikipedia again you can find some more information, not all of the commands work mind you.

If you know of any more cool commands within Unix or Mac please leave one below. In the mean time I am off to play.