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.

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

I had long toyed with the idea of getting a mac but wasn’t sure due to the higher comparative costs for the hardware and whether I would get along with it or not. Rest assured those in the same position, you must make the leap. I took the plunge at the low end of the financial scale and went for the Mac Mini. A marvellous piece of kit, designed to perfection, aren’t they all, small, compact yet powerful. I added to it with the Iomega 500 GB hard drive, again designed to sit neatly under the Mini and at the time £80 for a 500GB drive was well priced and worth it. The first comment my dad made on seeing the shiny white box was “where’s the computer”, having spent years looking at towering machines I guess its difficult to see how the same thing can be packaged so delicately and good looking.

I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to grips with the Mac and am now getting itchy Mac feet. As I place more and more demand on my machine I feel its time to start looking to upgrade to a shiny new one. My dilemma this time is iMac or Mac book pro. My ever hectic life would be less hectic if I could work whilst on the move or whilst watching the football. Since April 2009 I have been using Macs at work too. I now have in front of me a 24″ iMac with additional 20″ screen off to the right. Over to the left side is 21″ iMac that I have for testing new websites for cross browser compatibility. Installed on this machine are 3 versions of Windows, XP, Vista and Win7 all running on VMware Fussion… at once… together with no problems; try getting that from a similar specification windows machine… blue screen of what I hear you cry.

Off to email Santa!

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