terminator

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions about managing DVD collections in a central networked library, a missing or malfunctioning "purge" command in OS X, and options for archiving photos from an iPhoto library. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Managing DVD collections in a central networked library MacFixIt reader "brunnerr" asks:

There are times when using the Terminal that you might enter a command or two and then want to either run it again or review a whole sequence of commands that have been entered. This can easily be done by pressing the up arrow, scrolling through the previous commands, and then pressing Enter to execute the selected one again. In addition to this approach, the Terminal supports a number of other options for revealing and rerunning entered commands.

The Terminal is able to do this because it stores a small history of the commands you have run both in its … Read more

Hackers broke into keypads at more than 60 Barnes & Noble bookstores and made off with the credit card information for customers who shopped at the stores as recently as last month.

The company discovered the breach on September 14 but kept it quiet while the FBI attempted to track the hackers. Hackers broke into the point-of-sale terminals at 63 stores across the country, including locations in New York City, San Diego, Miami, and Chicago.

Since discovering the breach, the company has uninstalled all 7,000 point-of-sale terminals from its hundreds of stores for examination. Although only one terminal in … Read more

When you run a script or command in the OS X terminal, it can be useful to have some indication for when it is completed, especially if the script is a lengthy process you might not wish to monitor at all times. Unfortunately when a script or command finishes running, the Terminal will drop you to the command line again, without any notice to you. However, if needed, you can set up the system to run commands so it does offer some notification.

System alerts The first option is to have the terminal invoke the system alert after the command … Read more

OS X applications and services often contain a number of hidden settings that can be used to tweak your Mac's behavior to improve performance or provide an option that is not available by default. To manage these hidden options, you can use the "defaults" terminal command to edit the target preferences file associated with a service and manually adjust a variable's value.

Since the defaults command performs these edits in a single line in the Terminal, it is relatively easy to use and is often suggested as a way to edit property list (plist) files, which … Read more

When connecting to a system remotely using SSH (Secure Shell), usually you provide the SSH command string to log in to the system and then execute commands on the remote system using the current SSH session. This is the standard behavior and is good for performing system management tasks that take more than just a few steps, but sometimes you might only need to log in and run a single specific command or script.

For example, if you would like to check a Mac's process activity by using the "top" command, you would perform the following steps … Read more

Apple's Software Update is a convenient and easy way to keep your Mac up-to-date with the latest security fixes and feature enhancements. To make the service user-friendly, it's been available as a simple graphic-based tool in the Apple menu, but in recent versions of OS X Apple has integrated this service with its Mac App Store. Though it's convenient for most people, if you do not wish to open the Mac App Store for managing updates, there's a way you can avoid it.

Unfortunately there is no known way to revert the Software Update service from … Read more

Memory management in OS X is done primarily by the operating system's virtual memory system; however, there are a few approaches you can take to force the system to clear some aspects of its memory structure and free it up either for troubleshooting purposes or to perhaps help performance.

Part of the memory system in OS X is a cache, where recently used program information is stored so the system can more swiftly launch the program if needed. If you open the Activity Monitor utility in OS X and view the System Memory section, you will see this cache … Read more

The OS X Terminal is a very useful and powerful tool for troubleshooting Mac systems, and in doing so, one of the more common steps in getting a task done is to change directories to target files in it. The contemporary method of doing this is to use the "cd" (change directory) command and then specify a filesystem path; however, this can be a bit frustrating to deal with, especially if you are relatively new to the Terminal and are not too familiar with text-based filesystem browsing.

Given that Apple provides a fairly easy to use filesystem browser … Read more