The Terminal is a powerful macOS tool that lets you get under your computer’s hood and tweak the way it works in all manner of ways, from simple visual changes to updating your Mac and keeping it ...

If you are starting to experiment with the OS X Terminal, you'll want to know what commands are available. Here are some ways to explore your options. Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, ...

Use the command sudo softwareupdate -l to list all available updates. This command will prompt you for your administrator password and then display the updates. Install All Available Updates: To ...

The OS X Terminal opens up a world of powerful UNIX utilities and scripts. If you're migrating from Linux, you'll find many familiar commands work the way you expect. But power users often aren't ...

Mac OS X includes a great terminal editor, but among the handful of alternatives is one that easily rises above them all. iTerm2 is our pick for the best terminal emulator for Mac OS X thanks to its ...

Have you ever wanted a quick way to compare two directories (folders), in order to see which files may differ between the two? There are third-party GUI tools as well, but there’s actually a free ...

Any files that start with a period on a Mac are considered hidden files in the Mac OS and are not visible from within the Finder. You can see these hidden files from within the Terminal utility by ...

Although it is often simplest to add a new user to a computer running Mac OS X using the built-in graphical interface, you may prefer to do so from a Terminal window, perhaps because you are ...

Mac OS X Mountain Lion gives users several ways to access the Terminal and three common options for formatting a hard drive. You can launch Terminal within Mac OS X to format hard drives currently not ...

From time-to-time, removable media (including CDs, DVDs and others) can refuse to eject via the normal Mac OS X methods -- pressing the keyboard eject key; using the Command-E keyboard combination; ...