MacTricksAndTips.com

If you use Terminal regularly you may find yourself reading the ‘man’, pages frequently. These stand for manual and are the help guides for using the different commands. In Terminal if you type man command, where commands is replaced by the command you are using you can view the help guide. Quickly scrolling and viewing the data within the command can be a bit of a pain. For a very long command with many pages of help, it can be a little slow to view all of the information. To help us in this problem we can use a Terminal command to convert the man page to view in Preview. This is a lot more user friendly and allows you to use the resulting file like any pdf.

I have a previously discussed about generating random numbers in applescript, today I am going to discuss two methods which you can use to generate random numbers in Terminal. This is useful for bash, terminal or any other scripts which use the language. The two methods allow you to have a certain element of control on the size and the randomness and type of number produced. There are certain levels of randomness with random numbers produced by computers. One of the options shown will use an aspect of your Mac which is very random.

This is a rather simple tip that will allow you to clear Terminal history either selectively or every entry within the terminals history file. When you type in Terminal history it will show you every single entry you have made. Previously I have mentioned how you can change the history size to suit, however if it is becoming rather large, or you want to remove entries that you do not want other people to access, such as a super secret location you don’t want other people to find out about, it is worth removing entries.

In this modern digital world we generate a lot of digital media, one of the most prevalent is movies. After a while I have a lot of indiviual movie files that could be better used as one long movie. This post aims to show you how to combine these movie files into one long movie. This isn’t going to use an app like iMovie where you have to create a movie or apply any video editing. This post is going to show you how to stick lots of movies together in a simple and easy to use way. There is going to be two methods shown, one using Terminal and one with Quicktime, where you can pick the best option for yourself.

I love Time Machine. Its a simple way to keep all your files backed up and my Time Capsule is slowly filling up with data. I have, however, come across a problem here the back up process itself does get stuck. This recently happened to a friend and in short of restarting or pulling out the cable I wanted to find a more graceful method. I’ve found two ways to stop a stuck time machine backup.

Sorry its been a long time since the last post, so I am going to start with an interesting one. I quite enjoying digging out and finding new command line updates to run and use. Today’s command line post will allow you to download and install software updates from Terminal or the command line. Its great for those scripts you may be building and want to add that extra functionality to them.

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.