50 macOS Tips and Tricks Using Terminal (the last one is CRAZY!)

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About this video

A rapid tour of about 50 macOS Terminal tips, mixing built-in commands, Unix basics, and Homebrew extras. Highlights include using ‘say’ to make the Mac speak, retrieving a saved Wi-Fi password with security find-generic-password -w and piping output to pbcopy, keeping the Mac awake with caffeinate, changing screenshot name, file type, and save location with defaults write com.apple.screencapture, viewing and clearing the download-history database, and changing a password with passwd. A speed round covers familiar Unix tools — cd, ls, pwd, whoami, mv, cp and macOS’s ditto, df -h, nano, man, open, ping, ifconfig filtered with grep and awk, traceroute, dig, ps, top sorted by memory, and kill -9 — plus switching between zsh and bash, uptime, flushing DNS cache, qlmanage previews, diff, curl for downloads and weather, history, and disabling Gatekeeper with spctl. After installing Homebrew he adds novelty tools cmatrix, ascii-aquarium, toilet for ASCII text, and a terminal Tetris clone, shows starting a quick web server with python3 -m http.server on port 8000, and finishes with editing /etc/pam.d/sudo to enable Touch ID for sudo via pam_tid.so so a fingerprint replaces typing the sudo password.

Key takeaways

macOS is Unix-based, so most core Linux commands — cd, ls, grep, ps, top, kill, dig, traceroute and others — work the same in its Terminal.
Terminal can surface things the GUI hides, such as saved Wi-Fi passwords and a database history of everything ever downloaded.
Screenshot behaviour is configurable from Terminal via defaults write com.apple.screencapture for name, type, and location.
Homebrew is presented as the missing package manager for macOS and is the gateway to extra terminal tools and novelties not installed by default.
Touch ID can be enabled for sudo by adding a pam_tid.so line to /etc/pam.d/sudo, and python3 -m http.server instantly shares the current folder on port 8000.

Episode details: published November 21, 2022 · 11:11 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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