Daniel Platt - Tweak Your Mac Terminal: Command Line macOS

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-6170-5 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

With lots of thanks to my wife, Sarah and my two children, Ellie and Livy, for being patient with me while I wrote this book.

I would also like to thank my friend Simon for double-checking and improving the content.

I am very grateful to Apress for taking a chance with me.

Finally, thanks go to my colleagues at Comparison Tech. for suggesting additional ideas.

All personal computers these days come with a graphical user interface (GUI), although this hasnt always been the case. Most computers prior to the release of the Apple Macintosh booted into a terminal, text-only environment. All you would have been greeted with was a flashing cursor.

If your computer didnt come with a user manual, you might have struggled with which commands you should be typing, as some command lines were not very intuitive. If you didnt grow up using a terminal then I can imagine the prospect to be quite daunting. This is where this book comes in! I want to help you to feel just at ease with a terminal as you do with a mouse and the GUI.

The macOS Operating System comes with lots of preinstalled applications. Some of them you knowCalendar, Mail, Photos, and Safari. Others, you wont be familiar with, and they are more commonly known as commandsthis includes cat , cp , df , echo , and rm .

One application has been bundled with macOS since the first release, back in 2001. The application is normally relegated to the average user as a way to perform tips and tricks that can be found on the Internet. The application is called Terminal, and its shown in Figure . In this chapter we take a high-level look at this application before digging deeper into it in subsequent chapters.

Figure 1-1

The Terminal application

This book is a journey into a world of Terminal and the hidden commands and utilities that you are unlikely to be aware of. These commands are not like the normal applications, where you use a mouse and GUI to interact with them. Commands do not have a traditional GUI and they operate entirely from the keyboard.

The way to use these commands is by using the Terminal application that is provided with every version of macOS, hidden within the Utilities folder, as shown in Figure . The Utilities folder can be found inside the Applications folder.