Geekality » Mac

How to enable verbose booting in Mac OS X

Torleif — Wed, 12 May 2010 07:41:52 +0000

I’m a curious guy, so I wanted to see if there was anything interesting happening behind the Apple logo when the Mac I use at work boots up.

Turned out it was quite simple to enable and disable this feature. To enable it, just open up a Terminal and run the following command:

$ sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

When you reboot the next time, you will see all the fun stuff happening during the boot up. If you get tired of it, you can disable it again by running:

$ sudo nvram boot-args=

That’s it!

Disappearing color labels in Mac OS X

Torleif — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:45:43 +0000

Had a tiny fight with Mac OS X the other day, like I often do. This time it was color labels. You probably know (if you have used Mac OS X at all) that you can color label your files. You simply right-click them in the Finder and select a color label.

This can be quite a handy feature, but not so much when it doesn’t work. My problem was that I would give a bunch of files color labels, but then shortly after that the label simply disappeared. I could look at the file in the Finder, it had its label, I’d click on it, and the label disappeared. In fact the color label was already gone, it was just that the Finder is kind of slow to update itself (O’ how I miss F5 sometimes…).

You can check if a file really has a label or not by opening up a Terminal and using the following command on the file in question:

$ mdls -name kMDItemFSLabel somefile.ext

It will give you back a number and if the number is greater than zero it means the file has a label.

Either way, after some digging I found that it might have to do with some XSan issues or corrupt meta files. Mac OS X spreads these meta-files around wherever it goes and apparently they go corrupt from time to time. The way to fix this issue (and perhaps others?) is to clear them out and let them be recreated. As these files are hidden in the Finder, and Mac OS X is so kind to not give us an easy way of showing hidden files, I once again opened up a Terminal. I then went to the directory with the broken meta-files and ran these two commands:

$ rm ._*
$ rm .DS_Store

You then visit the folder in Finder and all labels should be gone. Re-label them, and you should be back to normal. Hope this can help someone else

Note: If you want to do this recursively in a directory, you can run this:

$ find . -name .DS_Store -delete
$ find . -name "._*" -delete

Note: If you have files without an extension, like some video instead of somevideo.mov, Finder won’t know how to open these files anymore after you remove the meta-files. If that happens I recommend you either stick the correct extension on the file, or you right-click the files, select Get Info, and then under the Open with category select the application you want the file to be opened with. (But seriously, just giving the files proper extensions to begin with is a lot easier to work with… at least I think so…)

Helpful Unix and Mac commands

Torleif — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:30:35 +0000

I am for the most part a Windows user. I was kind of moving towards Linux, Ubuntu in particular, but that ship pretty much sailed when I got my hands on Windows 7. Awesome, awesome operating system. But, I still have to use some Unix and Mac systems once in a while. And then there are certain commands that I often use, but always forget since it usually goes a bit of time between times I do it. So, what follows is basically just a list of commands that I keep forgetting, but keep having to look up again.

Remove .DS_Store files

Removes all those ~~stupid~~annoying DS_Store files that Mac litters around wherever it goes. Works in the current directory and downwards.

find . -name *DS_Store -exec rm {} \;

Recursivly download a whole website

wget -T 5 -t 0 -m -np -w 5 --random-wait -E -k -p -P output/dir http://website

Show hidden files on in OS X

Swap TRUE with FALSE to hide them again. The second line kills and relaunches Finder.

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder && open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app

Redirect std error to std out

ls -ld /home /qwerty 1>log 2>&1

Compress and decompress files

# Compress
tar czvf archive.tar.gz filedir filedir
tar cjvf archive.tar.bz2 filedir filedir

# Decompress
tar xzvf archive.tar.gz
tar xjvf archive.tar.bz2

Find open files

lsof | grep filename

SSH filesystem on Mac

First download and install sshfs for Mac OS X. Then to mount

mkdir -p ~/sshfs/server1
/Applications/sshfs/bin/mount_sshfs server1_hostname: ~/sshfs/server1

And to unmount (and uninstall the sshfs)

umount ~/sshfs/server1
sudo /Applications/sshfs/uninstall.sh