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To install software updates from the command line, you'll use the aptly named 'softwareupdate' command. Here are the most relevant usages of the command for most users: softwareupdate -l will give you a list of all updates available softwareupdate -i [package name] will install the specified package softwareupdate -i -a will install all updates available softwareupdate -i -r will install only the recommended updates softwareupdate --ignore [package name] will ignore specified update softwareupdate --help for more info on the softwareupdate command You'll likely need to use the sudo command to actually install the updates on a Mac, simply place sudo in front of one of the above commands to run it with full permissions as root. For example: sudo softwareupdate -i -r

Strangely hidden from the casual user is a spiffy command line utility that allows you to view, configure, and troubleshoot your Mac's wireless connection. It doesn't appear to be well documented, and judging by the obscure location of the command, Apple probably didn't think it would be too useful for the average Mac user. But the hidden command line airport tool is very useful indeed, so here is how to access it, and how you can use it too. The first thing you'll want to do is create a symbolic link to the airport command, because it is situated in a very inconvenient location for quick usage.

SleepWatcher is a command line tool (daemon) for Mac OS X that monitors sleep, wakeup and idleness of a Mac. It can be used to execute a Unix command when the Mac or the display of the Mac goes to sleep mode or wakes up or after a given time without user interaction. It also can send the Mac to sleep mode or retrieve the time since last user activity. A StartupItem, sample start and sleep scripts and the source code for sleepwatcher are included in the download. A little bit knowledge of the Unix command line is required to benefit from this software. SleepWatcher is published under the GNU General Public License.

If there's a more neglected or misunderstood Mac utility than the Terminal, OS X's built-in command-line app, we've yet to find it. In an age where Apple's $200 smart phone offers the most intuitive graphical user interface the world has ever seen, turning to a text-only command-line window can seem stubbornly retro, reminding us of audiophiles who vociferously insist that vinyl records sound better than music CDs. But there are plenty of reasons for using the command line beyond mere nostalgia: speed, flexibility, and familiarity with OS fundamentals, to name a few. We've collected 25 Terminal-based solutions for common desktop issues, because knowing these tricks is an invaluable addition to any Mac user's toolbox. And while there is no reason to abandon the Finder, think of mastering the Terminal as learning to drive a car with a manual transmission-once you can drive a stick, you can drive anything.

Apple Remote Desktop includes tools, remote UNIX commands, and command line tool info

Mac OS X only: GeekTool is a nifty utility that incorporates text files, the output of shell commands and images onto your Mac's desktop. GeekTool ranks up there with Quicksilver in my "Oh my God, why doesn't this exist for Windows" list. Especially indispensable for command line lovers, GeekTool is fantastic for keeping tabs on your system or tracking your life in .txt right on your desktop.

Sure enough: networksetup -setairportnetwork Airport 'Your SSID Here' 'Network Pa$$wOrd Here' did just what I wanted, and it did not require an administrator password or sudo. If you need to get a listing of all of the current Wi-Fi networks which are broadcasting SSIDs, you can use 'airport -s' for a list which will also show what security measures are used. By the way, if you aren't familiar with networksetup, you should definitely read up on it. It has a lot of features that could come in handy. It also wields a great amount of power, so be careful. The command listed above is fairly innocuous but there is a lot more it can do.

diskutil repairPermissions /

As a Mac sysadmin, I've had the need to manipulate the dock on hundreds of systems at a time. I used to cobble together terrible shell scripts to do the job, but now thanks to plistlib and python, plist manipulation is really easy. I am releasing this utility free under the Apache 2.0 license. Hopefully some other sysadmins will find it useful. dockutil is a command line utility for managing Mac OS X dock items. It can add, replace, list, move, find, and delete dock items. It supports Applications, Folders, Stacks, and URLs. It can act on a specific dock plist or every dock plist in a folder of home directories. It is compatible with Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard.

dscl -- Directory Service command line utility

Add Item to Dock is a flexible, open-source tool, released for the benefit of system administrators. Add Item to Dock provides an interface to the defaults program, allowing you to add items to the dock via the command line.

>> get rid of those pesky softwareupdates ~ sr/sbin/softwareupdate is a command line utility to perform software updates under Mac OS X.

One of the classrooms I maintain is comprised of 2.4Ghz iMacs (MB323LL/A) that are dual booted with Windows XP and Mac OS X. Sometimes when the workstations are restarted from XP to OS X the display brightness gets changed to its dim power saver setting. This requires the user manually increase the display brightness by pressing the F2 key, which is inconvenient. I haven't been able to determine the cause of this issue so I wanted to create a login hook to increases the brightness as a temporary fix. OS X doesn't ship with a command line utility that let's you change display brightness. Fortunately, Nicholas Riley has written a utility that uses OS X frameworks to accomplish this quickly and easily. Here's the code

QTCoffee 1.2.5 is a set of command-line Mac OS X utilities for manipulating QuickTime movies and other QuickTime readable media (AVIs, MPEGs, as well as audio files such as MP3s and AACs). Features include: Joining (concatenating) movies or audio files, so they play one after the other Multiplexing of movies so they play at the same time. Useful for: Putting together audio and video tracks from other utilities Masking unwanted (noisy) parts of a video Letterboxing content Picture-in-picture effect Watermarking video Scaling movie tracks (for resizing video content) Changing the playback rate of movies or audio Extracting or removing tracks Extracting or removing chapters Splitting a movie into equal duration pieces or at specified times Splitting a movie into individual chapters Creating chapters or connecting chapter tracks and creating chapter files for AAC podcasts to be processed with Apple's ChapterTool

Clam AntiVirus is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool for automatic database updates. The core of the package is an anti-virus engine available in a form of shared library.(Read more...)