Linux Terminal For Mac Os X

Mar 02, 2017 Linux Mac OS X Terminal Tutorial Part 1 Introduction to; has been made public on our website after successful testing. This tool will work great on MAC OS and WINDOWS OS platforms. And Latest mobile platforms Linux Mac OS X Terminal Tutorial Part 1 Introduction to has based on open source technologies, our tool is secure and safe to use. Terminal Commands To Check Disk/File Usage. The du command. It’s one of the standard Linux commands to retrieve the disk usage of files and folders. If you wish to check the disk usage of a folder and its subfolder, then run the following command. $ sudo du /home/techbeamers/ 4 /home/techbeamers/.X11-unix 4 /home/techbeamers/VBoxOGL/system 8 /home/techbeamers/VBoxOGL 4 /home/techbeamers/ssh-oWoYdKmZ1162 4 /home/techbeamers/.ICE-unix 4 /home/techbeamers/keyring-z6fUcL 8.

  1. Mac Os Terminal Prompt
  2. Terminal For Mac Os
  3. Mac Terminal Commands
  4. Linux Terminal For Mac Os X 10 11
  5. Linux Terminal For Mac Os X

The best way to find out how to use the Unix command line is to jump right into the Terminal application, which comes with OS X. Click the Launchpad icon on the Dock, click the Utilities folder, and then click the Terminal icon.

You can also jump directly to the Utilities folder from the keyboard by pressing Shift+Command+U (which displays the Utilities folder in a Finder window). Double-click the Terminal icon there. By the way, feel free to make Terminal more accessible by dragging its icon from the Utilities folder to the Dock.

Consider yourself prompted

Upon launch of the Terminal application, you’ll immediately notice some text in the window that appears onscreen, as shown in this example:

This text details the last time that you logged in to Terminal. The last line, however, is the more important one: It’s the prompt.

The prompt serves some important functions. First, it lists the current directory, which is listed as ~ in the preceding example. A tilde character (~) denotes a user’s Home directory. By default, you’re always in your Home folder each time you begin a new session on Terminal. After the current directory, Terminal displays the name of the current user, which is markchambers in this example.

As you’ve probably surmised, a folder and a directory are two different names for the same thing. Folder is the name with which most Mac users are familiar, and directory is a term that Unix power users prefer.

The final character of the prompt is a $. Consider this your cue because immediately after this character is where you enter any command that you wish to execute.

Go ahead; don’t be shy. Try out your first command by typing uptime in Terminal. This shows you a listing of how long your Mac has been running since the last reboot or login. (It’s a good idea to type Unix commands in lowercase because case-sensitivity is all-important in Unix.) Your text appears at the location of the cursor, denoted by a small square.

If you make a mistake while entering the command, no worries. Just press Delete to back up, and type the characters again. If the typing error is stuck deep in a longer command, press the left- or right-arrow key to move the cursor immediately after the incorrect character and press Delete to back up; then type the correct characters. After you type the command, press Return to execute it.

In the preceding example, the computer has been running for 2 hours and 42 minutes (2:42 in line 2). Simple, eh? Immediately following the listing of the uptime command (line 3), the Terminal displays another prompt for you to enter more commands.

Prefer a different appearance for the Terminal window? Click the Terminal menu, choose Preferences, and click the Settings toolbar button to choose the color combinations for the Terminal window background and text.

A few commands to get started

As you use the command line to navigate through the various folders on your hard drive, you’ll lean on two vital commands: ls and cd. The ls command is shorthand for list, and it does just that: It lists the contents of the current directory. Enter ls at the prompt, and you see a listing of your Home folder.

The complementary cd command (again, note the lowercase) — change directory — opens any folder that you specify. It works much the same as double-clicking a folder in Finder: The difference is that following the cd command, you don’t immediately see the entire folder’s content. Too, the cd command requires a parameter (extra options or information that appear after the command) so that your Mac knows which folder to open.

For example, to open the Documents folder in your Home directory, type cd Documents and press Return. Hmm. Another prompt is displayed immediately. So where are all the files in the Documents folder? You must enter another command to see what items are in the folder that you just opened. Type your old friend ls again to see the contents of the Documents folder.

The preceding example works for a folder named with just one word. To open a folder with any spaces in its name, make sure to enclose the folder’s name in quotation marks, like this:

You can also precede a space (or any other character that the command line treats as special, such as an *) in a name with a backslash, like this:

To return to your Home folder in this example, enter a modified version of the cd command:

Os x terminal commands list

This causes your Mac to move back up the folder hierarchy one folder to your Home directory. By using these three simple commands — ls, cdfoldername, and cd . — you can traverse your entire hard drive (or at least those locations where you have permission to peruse).

After you successfully enter a command, you can recall it by pressing the up-arrow key. Press the up-arrow key again to see the command prior to that, and so forth. This is an extremely useful trick for retyping extra long file paths.

Using the mouse skills you already have

Just because the Terminal is text-based doesn’t mean that it doesn’t act like a good Macintosh citizen. All the usual Mac features that you know and love are there for you to use. The familiar Copy function works anywhere, as you might expect. Paste, however, works only at the prompt position.

Drag-and-drop is also at your disposal. After you play around with the Terminal for a while, you’ll find yourself bored to tears typing the long paths that represent the files on your hard drive. To automatically enter the path of a file or folder to a command, simply drag it to the active Terminal window. The file’s full path instantly appears at the location of your cursor. (Thanks, Apple!)

You can even use the mouse while entering commands in the Terminal. Click and drag your mouse over text to select it. From there, you can copy to the Clipboard as you might expect with any other application.

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.

Download Free

How 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.

  1. Type cd ~/Documentsthen and press Return to navigate to your Home folder.

  2. 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.

Mac

Wifi looking for networks mac os sierra. 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.'

  1. Open a Finder window and navigate to your Documents folder.

  2. Type cd and drag the Documents folder onto the Terminal window.

  3. 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:

  1. cd~/Documents/Terminal Test

  2. 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

Whether you want your Mavericks machine to get an early Yosemite feel or you’re beta testing the latest version of OS X, these icons are well worth adding to your dock. There is also an to the pack by the same designer, as well as a of system icons, iOS 7-style. ( Note: if the download doesn’t work in Safari, try it in another browser.)Individual iconsBelow are several single icons in the style of OS X Yosemite. Those running the beta may also want to take a look at this pack, as it contains Yosemite-style icons for some of the apps that Apple has yet to update, as well as a few icons for popular third-party apps.This icon pack uses square icons with rounded corners, making it very similar to iOS’s design. This icon pack stands out because of its sizable number of icons, as well as the included.PSD template file for creating your own icons to blend with the style of Dots.If you don’t enjoy the beta life but still want Yosemite’s new look, you can meet it halfway with this icon pack containing the default icons from Apple’s redesigned desktop OS. Os x mavericks icons for windows 8.

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.

Copy files from one folder to another
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  1. cd ~/Downloads/

  2. 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

  1. defaults write com.apple.screencapture location [path to folder where you want screenshots to be saved]

  2. Hit Return

  3. killall SystemUIServer

  4. Hit Return

Mac Os Terminal Prompt

Change the default file type for screenshots

By default, macOS saves screenshots as .png files. To change that to .jpg, do this:

  1. defaults write com.apple.screencapture type JPG

  2. Press Return

  3. killall SystemUIServer

  4. Press Return

Delete all files in a folder

Terminal For Mac Os

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.

Mac Terminal Commands


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.

Linux Terminal For Mac Os X 10 11

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!

Linux Terminal For Mac Os X

These might also interest you: