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Mac OS X: (not nearly) complete guide to the Mac OS X command line interface

The purpose of this document is to gather all Mac OS X specific terminal commands. I'm a frequent CLI user, even in Mac OS X and had to search a lot in order to find all these specific commands. Hence this document to keep them all in one place as a reference :p. Note that these are Mac OS X specific commands! So a widespread command as for instance 'ls' is not included! Commands were tested on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

  • appleping: 'ping' for Appletalk networks.

  • bless: View or change Mac OS X boot volume options.

  • certtool: Manage TLS/SSL certificates and keychain access (See 'man openssl').

  • defaults: Allows users to change Mac OS X user defaults from the cli.

  • ioreg: Shows I/O Kit registry.

  • lsbom: List the content of a 'bom' file. (See 'man bom' for more information on 'bom' or 'bill-of-materials' files)

  • mkbom: Make a 'bom' file. (See 'man bom' for more information regarding 'bom' files)

  • nvram: manipulate the Open Firmware NVRAM.

  • open: Open a file as if it were double-clicked.

  • opendiff: Open and compare 2 files (Cfr. Unix 'diff' command).

  • otool: Displays specified parts of object files or libraries. (Cfr. unix 'ldd').

  • plutil: Property list (.plist) utility.

  • pmset: Modify the power management settings.

  • redo_prebinding: Redo the prebinding of an executable or dynamic library. See http://www.kernelthread.com for more information regarding pre-binding.

  • say: Text to speech converter.

  • screencapture: Screen capture utility.

  • scselect: Change the network location. Is equivalent to changing the Network Location in the System Preferences pane.

  • service: Interface to stop and start Mac OS X services.

  • sips: Scriptable image processing system.

  • softwareupdate: This is the command line version of "Software Update". Useful for updating your Mac OS X installation via a remote ssh connection or via the terminal.

  • system_profiler: Reports system hardware and software configuration. This is the command line equivalent to 'About This Mac, More Info...' in the Apple menu.

  • update_prebinding: Update prebinding information when new system libraries or frameworks are installed. See http://www.kernelthread.com for more information regarding pre-binding.

  • nicl: NetInfo Command Line Utility. For more information regarding NetInfo, go here.

  • nidump: Dump NetInfo information in unix FF format.

  • niload: Load NetInfo information from unix FF format.

  • niutil: read and write domain in plain text.

  • nifind: find a NetInfo directory.

  • nigrep: performs a regular expression search on NetInfo.

  • nireport: prints tables from NetInfo.

  • dscl: directory services command line utility. Dscl is preferred over the ni* set of commands.

  • scutil: interface to configd to manage Network Locations etc.

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