• Mac OS X,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Using My Mac As An Alarm Clock

    The at command can be used to schedule jobs to be run at certain times. I have a hard time getting up in the morning. Here, we’re going to echo a command that we want to be run at a certain time. In this case, we’re going to open a song to make into our alarm clock: echo 'open ~/Desktop/bangbang.m4v 2>/dev/null' | at 07:00 tomorrow The job will then output. You can see jobs waiting to be run, along with when they’ll be run using the at command with the -l option: at -l In this case, the job is 2. You can then remove a job using the atrm command: atrm job…

  • Mac OS X,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Get Line Numbers With The Less Command

    One of the great things about cat is that you can view the contents of a file with line numbers. You do so using the -n option, as follows: cat -n ~/Desktop/myFile Sometimes a file is too big to view though, so you can pipe the output to less, to combine some of the best features of each: cat -n ~/Desktop/myFile | less Obviously, the same thing would work with more: cat -n ~/Desktop/myFile | less You can also do something similar with the grep command and the -n option: grep -n ^ ~/Desktop/myFile | less Enjoy.

  • Mac OS X,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    cd To The Previous Directory

    The cd command has lots of fun little shortcuts. One I use frequently is the -. The ~ always takes you to your home directory, but using cd – will take you to the last directory you were in. For example, if you do the following on a Mac: cd ~ Then you do .. (which is a shortcut for the directory above the one you’re in): cd .. Then pwd will show that you’re in /Users. But, if you cd to – again: cd - Now you’re back in your home folder. The – expands to OLDPWD. Quick tip. Nothing more to see here.

  • Mac OS X,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Bash: A Silly wc Example

    The wc command is used to count words, characters and lines. Here, we’ll run it a few different ways. -l shows the number of lines in a file. For example, in my home directory, I can use it to see how many lines are in my .gitconfig file: wc -l .gitconfig This would output something like the following: 11 .gitconfig Or count the number of characters with -c: wc -c .gitconfig Or check the number of words: wc -w .gitconfig You can also run it against multiple files. For example, here I’ll check the number of lines in both my .gitconfig file and my .gitignore_global files: wc -l .gitconfig .gitignore_global…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Kill Processes With Open Handles on PIDs

    You can kill a process using the kill command. You can use lsof with -n to see the processes that have connections to a file. So, here, you can see lsof showing all files with an open connection: lsof -n You can also use the-c option to constrain output to a specific string. The kill command can then use the lsof command to kill all those processes, as follows: kill -HUP $(lsof -n -c /tty/i -t) Free your files…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Basic bash Looping

    In bash, there area number of ways you can write loops. Here, we’ll look at putting a single line with a loop in it. This will be done using the for command. For requires a do and a done. The do is what we’ll do for each iteration. Here, we’ll just run a loop from 1 to 10 and then we’ll do an echo on that variable so it displays on the screen as well loop: for i in {1..10} ; do echo $i; done The output would then be as follows: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10