droptips.com

There may be times when you need to access whatever is on your clipboard in a Terminal; maybe a particularly long URL for example.  And, there may be times when you want to put things on to the clipboard from a Terminal.

Reading the Clipboard

As it’s going to be text on the clipboard (even if it’s an image, it’ll just be the file name if you use this command), you can access it using the command pbpaste:

$ pbpaste
http://droptips.com/

So in this case, I have the text “http://droptips.com” on my clipboard, but what if I want to access that from a string of commands?  (I’m using curl as an example from another post)

$ curl -Is `pbpaste` | head -n1

By placing ` ` around the pbpaste command, it will run, and whatever it returns will be used instead.  So, the above command in this instance will actually run:

$ curl -Is http://droptips.com | head -n1

Of course, you may want to just run a few stats on the contents of your clipboards, and you can also do this using the wc command I posted about.  You can run pbpaste and pipe it through the wc command as follows:

pbpaste | wc -w

This will return the amount of words currently on the clipboard.

Writing to the Clipboard

But what if you want to get content onto the clipboard?  We use the pbcopy command.

So if I want to get the contents of a text file onto the clipboard, I could cat the file and pipe it through to pbcopy as follows:

cat myfile.txt | pbcopy

Anything which gets passed to pbcopy this way, will be on the clipboard.

Likewise, if I want to put a single line of text onto the clipboard, I could use the echo command:

echo "I want this on the clipboard" | pbcopy

As this is the normal clipboard, this content is available using the normal paste commands and of course pbpaste.

So if you ever find yourself needing to use the clipboard from a Terminal, then pbpaste and pbcopy are the commands to do it!

This is a quick little tip, to turn text into speech on OS X.

Open a Terminal and use the command say as follows:

say droptips rocks

Remember to have your speakers turned up and you’ll hear whatever you’ve typed after say.

Interestingly, if you type:

say x

It’ll Say “exx” or similar.

But if you do:

say os x

.. it’s clever enough to say “Oh Ess Ten” which is pretty impressive.

What use is there for this?  Well.. you could use say in scripts to read out certain parts and to create alerts, I guess.  You could also SSH to a remote Mac, and get it saying things like “Bring me a coffee”, but your mileage may vary on whether this works or not (getting the coffee from whoever was in the room at the time, that is!)

There are a few options, which are detailed within the manpage here: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/say.1.html

When you take a screenshot in OS X, using the default button combination, you’ll notice that it’s saved in PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format.

You may prefer another format, such as JPEG, but it’s not obvious on how to change it.

From within a Terminal, you can change it pretty easily:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

This would change the default format to JPEG, but you would need to log out and log back in for the change to take effect.

There are other formats too – Tiff, PDF, and the default PNG.  You can change to any of them by changing “jpg” on the command above to whichever you require, by using one of the following:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type tiff

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

Remember after changing the format, you will need to log out and log back in to OS X, for the changes to take effect.

When you take a screenshot in OS X, using the default keyboard shortcuts, it places the image file on the Desktop.  This might be OK in some instances, but what if you want to place it in a different directory, maybe one just for screenshots?

You can change the path using a Terminal.

Open Terminal and then type:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Path/Goes/Here

So, if you want to send all Screenshots to a directory within Pictures, for a user called “daz”, the command would be:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/daz/Pictures/Screenshots

You will need to log out and log back in to OS X for this change to take effect, but the next time you take a screenshot, it will place it in the directory of your choosing.

If like me you never use the Dashboard within OS X, you’ll be aware that it’s silentely in the background using up some resources.  You may have removed all of the widgets from the Dashboard, but it’s still there in the background, just not displaying anything.

This process definitely works in OS X Leopard (10.5), and it may work in other versions, too – please let me know via comments below!

You can disable it completely though, with a single command in a Terminal.

To Disable the Dashboard:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean yes

You will need to log off and log back in to see the changes, but the Dashboard should no longer be available.

To Enable the Dashboard:

If you then decide you’ve made a mistake by disabling it, and you want it back, just swap the -boolean to “no” as follows:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean no

Again, you will need to log off and then back on to see the changes.

There may be times when you would prefer to mount a Windows (smb) share from a Terminal in OS X; I certainly prefer to use the command line, and use it as much as possible – I just find it quicker than using Finder.

Mounting a share is pretty simple, using the mount command:

mount -t smbfs //servername/sharename mount/path

So, for example, if you have a server/PC called “WindowsPC” with a sharename on there of “Shared”, and you wanted to mount it at path /Users/daz/mnt, the command would be:

mount -t smbfs //WindowsPC/Shared /Users/daz/mnt

You may be prompted to supply a password for the share, but then it will mount.

Also note that if you don’t have DNS/Name resolution in place, servername can also be an IP address.

This will take your local OS X username, and use it to authenticate.  If you want to use a different username to authenticate as, you would put it before the machine name or IP like so:

mount -t smbfs //username@servername/sharename /mount/path

There are a few other options you may require, for some setups.  You can read the Apple manpage entry for mount_smbfs at the link below:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/mount_smbfs.8.html

Of course, you aren’t just limited to mounting shares via smb on Windows machines – OS X also offers Windows File Sharing, which uses the same protocol, as does Samba in Linux/BSD. You can use the same commands here to mount shares on other systems utilising this protocol.

After you get used to using the command line, you’ll probably find it much quicker/better at certain tasks. I’ll be supplying lots of tips here on droptips, to help you get to grips with using a Terminal more.