This is ideal when using the command line on a regular basis. One example is that I do a great deal of development on my local machine so when I eventually come to connect to the remote server I have to keep typing the ssh command out.

By typeing history on the command line you get a numbered list of all the commands. Now this on its own isn’t really useful but when coupled with the following becomes extremely useful.

If you now type !number and press enter this will execute the command. (Number is the number of the item from the returned list)

Better still if you do the following… !number:p this prints the command to the list so you can then edit the command if some parameters need to be changed.

It gets better… yu can filter the returned list by using the grep command. history | grep “search term”

Use the above command to print the required command to the command line and away you go.

In the past it has only been a few files, no more than 50 or so which didn’t pose a great problem but today I have uncompressed a file with over 4000 files in it… and yes they were all duplicated. This makes a mess of the files structure.

I decided to research the issue and find away of preventing this from happening. I came across this post on Jim Plush’s blog.

By using the following command when decompressing will prevent the dot underscore files being added to the Linux box.

tar -zxpvf mytarfile.tgz ––exclude=”._*.*”

Let me know if anyone finds something else or has any issues / success with this.

EDIT,

Aside from the above, which seems to be failing and the issue has not gone away with prayer so I have been on the case this morning and have found a working solution.

tar zxpf test.tar ––exclude ._*

It seems that missing the speech marks from the file name and removing the equals has done the trick.

My trash can had 19k items in it (been a while…) and wasn’t sure I wanted to just empty the trash en-masse so to speak but just clear out groups of files, like all the zips and rars, all gifs etc

By using the following terminal command I was able to clear out files by extension.

find /Users/USER_NAME/.Trash/ -name "*.zip" -delete

Firstly you will need to have the image you want to use and note the name of it (name-of-image.jpg)

Note that changing the default logon image has to be done using terminal as the files are locked in to the root user, unless of course you are logged in to the Mac using the root login.

So open Terminal from the Applications/Utilities folder and you are ready to go.

If you want to keep the old image then it needs to be renamed so enter the following line in to the terminal window

sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg.old

You will be asked for the password so just enter it and press enter.

sudo cp /path/to/image name-of-image.jpg /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg

WEnter your password again and then the next time you log in the new screen will be there.

Alternatively there is little app that can do this if you are not to sure about using Terminal.

Head over to loginox and see if this is for you

1 – defaults write “Apple Global Domain” AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth

Puts double scroll arrows at both ends of scroll bar. Use Appearance pane in system preferences to reset.

2 – defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

Shows hidden files in the finder. Replace TRUE with FALSE to hide hidden files again

More to follow…

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES && killall Finder


cat * > new_file_name.mp3


Navigate, using terminal or similar command line tool, to the folder where all the files that are to be joined are stored. Enter the command cat * > new_file_name.mp3 and hit enter. There you go that is it. A few seconds later you have a file in that directory that is all the other files joined together.
Something to note is that the * will join the files in order they appear in the folder. If you files are not in the correct order then you will need to use the following –


cat part_one.mp3 part_two.mp3 part_three.mp3 > new_file_name.mp3


I have not used this last action but please let me know you experiences.

Steve

So you have a large folder that is full of files that are no longer required. Having to wait while your Mac deletes 10 gigs worth of data is not going to be time well spent. Luckily for you there is Terminal (Applications/Utilities/)

Open up Terminal and depending on the folder you are wanting to delete you may need top login as the machines root user.

sudo su -

When prompted, enter your password. You are logging in as the root user to your machine so from this point you must be very careful!!!

Navigate to the directory that is housing the directory to be deleted. A good tip here is to list the contents to ensure your folder is there. I always use

ls -la

as it list the contents nicely with ownership of each directory shown.

Now to remove the folder type rmdir -r name_of _directory

Enter this command in to terminal and substitute name_of _directory with the name of your directory.

Don’t forget that when typing file names or folders you can type a first few unique characters of the name and press the Tab key.

Thanks Steve

When following this method to remove files from the trash please execute with extreme caution. Failing to do this correctly can result in some nasty outcomes.

The first thing is open up the Terminal, located in the Applications/Utilities folder and you should see something like:

name-of-my-mac:~ username$

At the prompt type:

sudo su -

Now enter you password when prompted. You are logging in as the root user to your machine so from this point you must be very careful!!!

You can now do one of two things, either locate the file using the command line or find the file in Finder and drag the file into the Terminal window. This will show you the location of the file. Navigate to the file from the command prompt in Terminal window, using the cd command.

You can now delete the offending item using the following command:

rm filename.ext

You will be asked to confirm deletion, type yes for yes and no for no… simple!

Hope this helps.