Saturday, March 5, 2011

Quick and Dirty Tips: 2 Terminal Commands

Terminal is a very useful application in Mac OS. It is a Mac application located at /Applications/Utilities folder. There are tones of command available you can use in Terminal. Actually many GUIs in Mac OK are based on those commands or scripts. The UI is used just for getting information to execute Terminal commands.

Here are two very interesting, I think useful as well, commands. The first one is reboot. Obviously it is a command to reboot your Mac. To execute it you have to use sudo command to do it:

YourMac:~$ sudo reboot
Password:

sudo is a command for supper user. The command reboot requires supper user to execute.

The second command is more flexible. It is shutdown. There are additional arguments you can specify to execute the command. For example, when you want to shutdown, reboot if you want to, force to shutdown if there are some other users on and messages you want to use as a warning notice. As same as the first one, you need to use sudo to execute the command:

YourMac:~$ sudo shutdown -r -k +2 Please get out of this machine!
Password:

The above commands will reboot the machine and force all the users log out in 2 minutes.

Another interesting thing I found is that normally, only the user with administrator privilege can execute above commands. If you are standard user, you cannot reboot your machine by those commands even you know the sudo password. This is Mac OS security issue. You may set standard user with root right, but I could not figure out. I think it is better to keep standard user in its default settings. Personally speaking, I think to use standard user is more secure. You just don't need the administrator rights in most cases if you just use apps such as Safari, iMovie, iPhoto or iWorks.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

iTunes 10.2 Update


This iTunes 10.2 update is related to the new coming iOS 4.3 sharing to mobile devices, according to AppleInsider.

The following is the comparison of the used space difference between before and after:

Command: df -lakUsed(Kilobytes in 1024-blocks)
Before ...35,236
After...70,000
Difference (A-B)34,764

Monday, February 28, 2011

Epson Printer Update 2.6

This is Epson Printer update 2.6.


The following is the comparison of the used space difference between before and after:

Command: df -lakUsed(Kilobytes in 1024-blocks)
Before ...8,804
After...2,204
Difference (A-B)-6,600

Monday, February 21, 2011

iWeb 3.0.3 Update

It has been for a while no update. I found this one two days ago and I did the update this morning.


The following is the comparison of the used space difference between before and after:

Command: df -lakUsed(Kilobytes in 1024-blocks)
Before ...133,484
After...343,408
Difference (A-B)209,924

Thursday, January 27, 2011

iTunes 10.1.2 Update

Quickly I have got this new update for iTunes 10.1.2. Two new featuers: AirPlay for Apple TV and Sync for all iSO devices. The later one is believed for iPhones 4 for Verizon, which will be out on February 10, 2011.


The following is the comparison of the used space difference between before and after:

Command: df -lakUsed(Kilobytes in 1024-blocks)
Before ...62,648
After...46,z596
Difference (A-B)-16,052

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

New Update: iDVD 7.1.1

This is a new update for all iDVD 7 users.


The following is the comparison of the used space difference between before and after:

Command: df -lakUsed(Kilobytes in 1024-blocks)
Before ...46,476
After...1,696
Difference (A-B)-44,780

Monday, January 17, 2011

Apple Store for Mac and Serval Other Updates

I was away on vacation for about 20 days. When I came back I found the following updates, including Apple Store for Mac.





The following is the comparison of the used space difference between before and after:

Command: df -lakUsed(Kilobytes in 1024-blocks)
Before ...244,232
After...16,972
Difference (A-B)-227,260