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I found a rather cool little tip that I thought I would post. Its in regards to opening the current folder you are browsing in while using Terminal. Many times I have wondered if there was a way to view my current folder, this is usually very useful if you are very deep within a directory and need to have a more visual look at it with Finder. I’ve also found that its useful when viewing the output of any bash scripts.

There is a lot of power available in Terminal, and if used correctly you can create some really interesting scripts and result. Today’s post is going to take advantage of some built in Airport frameworks to measure the strength of your connected Wi-Fi signal. Although you can download and use various different apps to do this, if you want a quick way measure the signal, to find the best place to put your laptop, or integrate into something like GeekTool. A quick Terminal script is what you need.

I enjoy a good board game every so often, they are even more fun when you can play them online or as a standalone game. The one game, however, that I can never really play is Scrabble. Simply because I can’t figure out words from the 7 tiles given to you. The best I can do is five letter words, swear words and adding the occasional ‘s’ or ‘ed’ to the end of the words. What I need is a way to cheat, or at least give me a helping hand. As the title of this post suggests there is a very simple and effective way to do this using some commands and files built into Terminal.

Quite a while ago I mentioned how you can convert Windows Docx files to Doc using a little app supplied by Microsoft themselves, its a simple way of saving money and not having to fork out for Office for Mac. That app is great for one or two files that you want to convert, however if you have hundreds of files or want to build this functionality into a bash script it can be a little bit difficult. However there is a suitable Terminal program that you can use. This script piggy backs on the functionality built into TextEdit, so any results you get from TextEdit you will see in this Terminal program.

Continuing from a post a couple of days ago about Hiding Hard Drive Icons From Your Desktop and reading into an insight full comment i’ve found a method where you can hide certain hard drive, folders and files from view. A quick method is to normally add a dot in front of the file name so it becomes a “dot-file” for example “.hiddenfile.txt”. This will make the file disappear from view. However this changes the file name and if you have any scripts or applications that rely on the exact file name this can be a problem, it can be even worst when you want to remove a Hard Drive, change the file name of such a volume can be disastrous. Therefore we are going to play around with a couple of Terminal programs to change the attributes of files, folders and even Hard Drives so we can hide them from view.

I hope you all had a good weekend and Easter. Today’s post is going to be a small follow on to Saturday’s post on editing your Bash profile. One of the comments gave me an idea of allowing you to open the file in TextEdit and edit the file from there, rather than trying to use Terminals built in file editor. I am going to expand on this and show you how to open a file from Terminal so you can edit in a different app. This is useful since you don’t have to fight with Terminal’s text editors, especially if you have limited knowledge of the workings or don’t like to use them.

The title of this post is a little misleading, what we are going to do today is develop our own Bash command to work in Terminal to allow use to do simple, repetitive commands, with only a couple of keys. Think of they as macros, a simple and easy way to cut down time. This doesn’t take long and it can be powerful, and like anything in life it just takes a little bit of know how. This tutorial is great if you have a specific folder which you visit again, or a Terminal command you run frequently. For example I have one where I type “hits” to get the current number of connections to my site, the actual code to do this is a bit long.

When you download files in Firefox and Safari and then open them you will get a message asking you if you want to open the file. It goes along the line of ‘”Example” is an application you have downloaded from the internet, are you sure you want to open it’, with various options. Its designed as a message barrier to stop you opening malicious files that could harm your Mac. The problem I have is that its a bit annoying and I know what I am downloading, if only there was some way of disabling this message. Thankfully there is, and like may commands to change preferences it is a one liner and only takes a couple of moments.