Small List Of GeekTool Commands 17
Tip
Hey
I have a new love on my Mac. That is the application GeekTool. It combines my love of Terminal and my love of the Mac’s GUI. The idea behind GeekTool is to display text on your desktop so you can see useful pieces of information. I like it because I don’t have to keep using Terminal. If you want more information check out my review on iLoveMacApps.
This post will be dedicated to the small Terminal commands that you can use to get the most out of GeekTool. Some will be simple, some will be complicated, but they all help. These have been found all over the Internet, but me not thinking ahead I forgot to write down any links to the authors, if you are the original curator of the little piece of code, please leave a comment and I am sure I can link to your site.
Default Log
One of the best logs I find to have on your Desktop is the following. It shows you useful pieces of information with out random bits thrown in.
/private/var/log/system.log
View Top Output
There is a lot of ways to view the output of top. The Unix command to view the current CPU usage. To see which one you like run it through Terminal to see which results come out the best for you. Each new line is a separate different command.
top -n 60 -l 2 | tail -61
top -l1 -u -o cpu -S
top -ocpu -FR -l2 -n20 | grep '^....[1234567890] ' | grep -v ' 0.0% ..:' | cut -c 1-24,33-42,64-77
Notice that is a “ell” and then a one on the middle one. Funny code writing.
Uptime With Load
My favourite little tool is uptime. Simply because it output the load for you. With load you can tell how badly your computer is living.
uptime
Disk Usage
If you want to view how much disk usage you are taking up simply type the following. You may have to change disk0s2 to a different number depending on your configuration.
df -h | grep disk0s2 | awk '{print "Macintosh HD:", $2, "total,", $3, "used,", $4, "remaining"}'
IP Address
If you are on a dynamic IP address or you simply want to know your IP address, this sort of command is probably very useful.
echo External IP: `curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | sed 's/[a-zA-Z<>/ :]//g'`
Internal IP Address
Same as above although this will show you an internal IP.
ifconfig en1 | GREP inet
Current Calendar Month
Pretty simple, a small little calendar
cal
If you want the date you can always use:
date
Current Homeland Security Threat Level
If you want to know what level your Terrorism you are suffering you can check out the threat level of the homeland security website.
curl -s http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition | grep CONDITION
To be perfectly honest you might as well type:
echo "Elevated"
Because it isn’t going to change any time soon.
Get Server Information
If you have a webserver or other server you can get various pieces of information using SSH, items like top doesn’t seem to work to well although other basic commands do.
ssh name@123.123.123.123 'command1;command2;
Conclusion
Hopefully if you are new to Terminal and code bench some of those command would be useful to you. I did originally want to make this post a lot longer but due to work and other matters that were really out of my control I have had to cut it short. If you know of any more please leave a comment.
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Where To Next?
17 Responses to “Small List Of GeekTool Commands”
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1
When I put in the first code – it said permission denied
And I hope you feel better
Jake
Comment By Jke Speyer on October 22nd, at 4:23 am
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2
Are these commands supposed to run in GeekTool? But GeekTool only allow a string which is only for file path isn’t it?
Or suppose I am to put the commands in a text file for GeekTool to use?
Comment By ignis fatuus on October 22nd, at 9:26 am
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3
No, you simply change the drop down from file to shell and you can copy and paste the command straight in.
@Jke, it sounds like a permissions error. It shouldn’t do that.
Comment By admin on October 22nd, at 1:51 pm
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4
I can’t understand the thrill of using Terminal. That’s why I became a Mac user in the first place… because when I first started using computers back in the 1980’s the choice was either MSDos or Mac’s GUI OS and I thought that having to remember commands and computer code to do everything was so limited and frustrating that I became a Mac convert straight away. Now you getting all wet over typing in command lines. Talk about stepping back in time. Make using computers easier not harder. Cheers, the ANTI GEEK.
Comment By Paulo on October 24th, at 6:09 pm
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5
I like commands because using them is actually easier. For the advance stuff it is a lot quicker to use Terminal than it is the GUI. No messing. Not everything I use Terminal for, just for getting some advance stuff done.
Comment By admin on October 24th, at 6:11 pm
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6
External Ip…
this works better for me…
Echo External ip:; curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org | sed ’s/[a-zA-Z/ :]//g’
Comment By David Cochran on February 14th, at 12:33 pm
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7
Getting the currently playing iTunes song up there would be nice.
Comment By DreadedKilla on April 5th, at 8:02 am
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8
@DreadedKilla: To get the currently playing iTunes song through the command line, use Script Editor to write and save this script (in this case I saved it as “current_track.scpt”):
tell application “iTunes”
try
if not (exists current track) then return
set current_track_artist to (get artist of current track)
set current_track_name to (get name of current track)
return current_track_artist & “: ” & current_track_name
end try
end tellNext, enter “osascript current_track.scpt” to run the script file and have the output returned to the Terminal.
Comment By Willem van Zyl on April 12th, at 9:10 pm
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9
@Willem van Zyl: I’ve tried it and all other hints for getting it up, but after having an icon show up, it’s always red and there is no info. Any troubleshooting tips?
I’m running Mac OS X 10.5.6 on an early 2008 white MacBook with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory, running iTunes version 8.0 and the latest version of GeekTool, if that helps any.
Comment By DreadedKilla on April 13th, at 3:11 am
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10
Your Terminal commands are very interesting. One I have already used is to change the screen capture format to JPG. Is there a command for deleting the “are you sure you want to …” message for shutting off the computer etc.? If I goof I can live with it.
Does using terminal commands like this make me a Hacker? On my own computer only, of course Then I can call myself a 77 year old Hacker.!
Let me know what the command is for getting rid of that annoying confirmation message
RodComment By Rod Hake on May 11th, at 2:31 pm
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11
@Rod, these command don’t really make you a hacker. I can’t find one about shutting off your computer, although I will have a look.
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12
when i try to enable geektool it says”Preferences need to be updated, please launch Geektool Preferences”
Comment By NAK0604 on May 29th, at 1:20 am
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13
and i am running the white macbook 10.5.7 and i have geektool 2
Comment By NAK0604 on May 29th, at 1:21 am
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14
Uninstall and reinstall the preference pane is probably the quickest way.
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15
Great job! THANK YOU!
Comment By Gertrude on December 4th, at 11:37 pm
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16
We need more posts like this!
Comment By Daniel on December 5th, at 10:32 pm
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17
It didn’t work for me, can you give us some more information?
Comment By Frankie on December 5th, at 10:50 pm
