Eight Terminal Utilities Every OS X Command Line User Should Know · mitchchn.me

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 aware that OS X comes with a number of its own text-based utilities not found on any other operating system. Learning about these Mac-only programs can make you more productive on the command line and help you bridge the gap between UNIX and your Mac.

Update: Thanks to reader feedback, I’ve written about a few more commands in a follow-up post: (And eight hundred more).

1. open

open opens files, directories and applications. Exciting, right? But it really does come in handy as a command-line double-click. For instance, typing:

…will launch Safari as if you had double-clicked its icon in the Finder.

If you point open at a file instead, it will try to load the file with its associated GUI application. open screenshot.png on an image will open that image in Preview. You can set the -a flag to choose the app yourself, or -e to open the file for editing in TextEdit.

Running open on a directory will take you straight to that directory in a Finder window. This is especially useful for bringing up the current directory by typing open .

Remember that the integration between Finder and Terminal goes both ways – if you drag a file from Finder into a Terminal window, its full path gets pasted into the command line.

2. pbcopy and pbpaste

These two commands let you copy and paste text from the command line. Of course, you could also just use your mouse—but the real power of pbcopy and pbpaste comes from the fact that they’re UNIX commands, and that means they benefit from piping, redirection, and the ability to be in scripts in conjunction with other commands. Typing:

…will copy a list of files in your home directory to the OS X clipboard. You can easily capture the contents of a file: