Mac OS Command Line

All macOS features are well thought out and their settings are optimal for most users. However, with Terminal commands, you can change the behavior of the system and expand its capabilities. And in some cases, this can be very useful.

Showing hidden files and folders in the Finder
It is not often that you need to see the hidden files on your disk. By default they are not displayed in the Finder, and you have to use a special command to see them.

How to enable:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool TRUE && killall Finder

How to disable:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool FALSE && killall Finder

Hiding files and folders
If you want to, you can also hide the private data on the disk from prying eyes. The chflags command is used for this. After that, you should enter the path to the file or folder that you want to hide. To avoid entering the path, you can simply type the command and then drag and drop the desired folder into the Terminal window.

How to enable:
chflags hidden ~/Desktop/Secret folder

How to disable:
chflags nohidden ~/Desktop/Secret folder

Copying text in the Viewer
Pressing the space bar in Finder opens a quick preview of the files. It’s very convenient to check the contents of text documents this way. Except that selection doesn’t work in this window – you have to open the document to copy text. To avoid wasting time on this, activate the highlighting feature for quick view.

How to turn it on:
defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool TRUE && killall Finder

How to disable:
defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool FALSE && killall Finder

Downloading files without a browser
You don’t have to use Safari or Chrome to download a file using a link from the internet. Sometimes it is much faster and easier to do this through “Terminal” with the curl command.

How to use:
curl -O https://get.videolan.org/vlc/3.0.3/macosx/vlc-3.0.3.dmg

Create a file of any size
It is convenient to test the speed of data transfer over the network or from external media by copying files. Searching for a movie or an image of the right size for this purpose takes a long time, so it’s much easier to create a test file using the mkfile command. You can set the desired size with a number and the symbols b, k, m or g, which stand for bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes, respectively.

How to use:
mkfile 1g test.abc

About me

Welcome to my blog!
My name is Fix. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself. My first entry in my employment history was as a software engineer. Before programming, I did a lot of things: I cast concrete rings and fences, drove eggs in a large poultry farm. I lived in the countryside, any job was a job there. Then I went to study in the city, at university I started a part-time job as a site administrator, at the same time I was making sites. We had no programming, only dabbling. So, although the first record in my employment record was that I was a programmer, I only saw what it was from afar.

When I was in my third year at university, I began to be lectured by people from a large company. They saw my potential and decided to hire me for an internship. Since then I have been working with real programming, although I did not stay with that company for long - after four months they sent me away, because I was not as fast as they expected. I had to look for my next job right away. At the end of 2012 I started working as a programmer again. At first I was a full-stack developer, and for the last four years I worked with .NET, C# - backend development mostly.

After gathering all my experience, I made the decision to start a blog about programming. Here you can find information about the command line. In the future my blog will be updated with informative topics related to programming.

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