Luckily though, the good old ‘defaults write’ command for OS X’s Terminal.app is still around to help us pop open that hood and tweak all the stuff that can’t be configured with just a point and a click. Here’s a quick roundup of a few defaults write commands that might make your early days with the new big cat a bit easier.

A few words about ‘defaults write’

The ‘defaults’ command allows users to interact with their user defaults via the terminal (located in the Applications>Utilities folder). Users can read, write, and delete user preference values that often aren’t available for configuration within an application’s normal preference panel. These commands can all be executed via the Terminal, and reversed by simply repeating the command with the original value swapped in for the replacements below. In most cases you’ll have to restart the application you’re trying to tweak before you can see the command’s effect. If you don’t want to mess around with the terminal, I’m sure many of these commands will soon find their way into an updated version of Secrets, which is a GUI preference pane for configuring this type of behavior.

The roundup

• Animations. There are a lot of new animations in Lion. New windows will warp into existence from a single point on the screen; email replies will fold their way out of threaded conversations; and desktops will go swishing by as you move from space to space. There’s at least two of these you can put an end to right now if you want:
  • Disable Mail Reply animations: “defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES”
  • Disable New Window animations: “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO”
• Character picker. If you’ve ever been frustrated by hunting around in the character viewer for accented characters like the “è” or the “ë” then you probably want to just leave this setting alone. If however, if you’d rather be able to hold down a key and just have it automatically repeat, like it used to, then this defaults write is for you.
  • Disable the character picker: “defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool NO”
• Window restore. Want to keep applications like Preview or QuickTime from restoring old windows that happened to be hanging around the last time you quit? Just switch out the name “Preview” in the command below to target other applications.
  • Disable window restore: “defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool NO”
• Bookmarks bar. You can get rid of both the Reading List icon and the Top Sites icon with this quick defaults write command:
  • Clean out icons from Safari’s bookmarks bar: “defaults write com.apple.Safari ProxiesInBookmarksBar ‘()’”
• Save sheet shortcuts. Lion changes around the default save sheet shortcuts for a little added safety. If you’ve got a lot of muscle memory devoted to “Command-D” as the shortcut for “Don’t Save,” you can bring it back if you want — though to be honest, with “D” and “S” being so close together, I prefer the new settings.
  • Revert save sheet shortcut: “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSSavePanelStandardDesktopShortcutOnly -bool YES”
• iOS spell check pop-up. Part of the overall “iOS-ification” effort in Lion was to bring over those helpful but sometimes annoying little spell correction pop-ups you get as you type. The autocorrect can be enabled on a document by document basis with a right-click in “Spelling and Grammar,” but if you just want to kill it off altogether, you can.
  • Disable the iOS-style spell correct: “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled -bool NO”
• ~/Library reveal. This last one isn’t technically a defaults command, but it’s too good to leave out. By default in Lion, user libraries are hidden. You can still navigate to the user library by holding down the “option key” while in the Go menu in the Finder, but if you want to restore ~/Library back to it’s proper place, just crack open the terminal and enter in the command below.
  • Restore ~/Library visibility: “chflags nohidden ~/Library”

I’m sure more hidden commands will surface as folks begin to settle into the new OS. I grabbed as many as I could find floating around, but if you’ve got some additional ones you’d like to share, please do so in the comments.

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First off, you’ll need to open up the Terminal application (/Applications > Utilities > Terminal), since these ‘Easter Eggs’ have to be run from the command line. Once you’ve got that open, you can copy and paste the commands below. Each command is one line only, and you should press Return after pasting in each command. To turn these off after, replace YES with NO (or vice-versa) and repeat the command.

Allow Dashboard Widgets to be Dragged Onto the Desktop

Sometimes it’s useful to keep one of you Dashboard widgets around after you close Dashboard, so paste the following into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES && killall Dock

To use this ability, click and hold a widget and then close Dashboard using your keyboard hotkey (usually F4 on newer Macs).

Stop Twitter’s Compose Window Floating

The compose window in Twitter for Mac floats above all other windows at all times, which can get annoying. To stop it floating, paste this into Terminal, then restart Twitter for Mac.

defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac NormalComposeWindowLevel -bool NO

Allow Escape to Close Twitter Compose Window

Another one for Twitter for Mac, this allows you to press Esc to close the new tweet window. Once again, paste and then restart Twitter for Mac.

defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac ESCClosesComposeWindow -bool YES

Show Hidden Files in the Finder

There are some files which the Finder keeps hidden, but you might want to be able to see them sometimes, such as .htaccess files for web developers. To show hidden files, paste this into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool YES && killall Finder

Your hidden files should now show up.

Disable the ‘Unexpectedly Quit’ Dialog

When an application crashes, you’ll see a dialog telling you the application quit unexpectedly. This can get annoying if it happens often, so you can disable that dialog using

defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType none

You may need to restart your computer for changes to take effect. To turn this back on again, replace ‘none’ with ‘prompt’.

Enable ‘X-Ray Folders’ in QuickLook

The QuickLook feature of Finder is great, but if you use it on a folder, you won’t see anything except a folder icon. Using this hidden setting, you’ll be able to see the contents of the folder when you use QuickLook.

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1 && killall Finder

To turn off, replace the ’1′ with a ’0′.

Show the File Path in the Finder Window Title

It’s easy to get lost in your file system, so enable this to show the path of the current folder in the title bar of your Finder window. That should make it easier to remember where you are.

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES && killall Finder

Disable iTunes Arrow Links

You’ll often see tips on how to change the arrow links in iTunes’ list view to go to your library instead of the store, but what about turning them off altogether? Paste this command and restart iTunes.

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Stop the Help Window From Floating

Another troublesome floating window is the Help window which appears when you click Help in most applications. To stop it floating, use

defaults write com.apple.helpviewer NormalWindow -boolean yes

Change the Desktop Picture on the Login Screen

If you don’t like the default image shown behind the login screen, you can change it to any other image using the following command. Just add the path of the image after the word ‘path’.

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture -path

Bonus: Control Even More Hidden Settings Using Secrets

Secrets is a preference pane which allows you to control even more hidden settings in Mac applications using a friendly interface, rather than having to use Terminal. You can download it here, and once installed you’ll find it at the bottom of System Preferences.

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The Xmarks developers offer alternatives, but the only one they can suggest for Safari users is Apple’s  MobileMe service. As MobileMe costs $99 a year, subscribing just for the sake of syncing your Safari bookmarks is a bit costly. If you use any other browser, there are free alternatives such as Firefox Sync and Chrome Sync.

I’ve seen some weird and wacky ways of syncing Safari bookmarks, including emailing yourself every time you change your bookmarks, or simply “remember which bookmarks you’ve added and add them on the other machine(s),” neither of which are helpful. I’ve discovered a much more useful method involving Dropbox. It’s not as automatic as Xmarks was, but it gets the job done.

There are two ways of doing this: one uses a free download called SymbolicLinker, and the other uses Terminal.app. I’ll start by going through the steps for using SymbolicLinker, then I’ll talk about the Terminal method.

Using SymbolicLinker

1. Download SymbolicLinker. It can be found on MacUpdate. It’s not an application, but a Service you can install, which adds a new option when you right-click an item in the Finder. To install it, simply double-click the SymbolicLinker.service icon.
2. Get Dropbox. You can sign up for free. A free Dropbox account gives you 2GB of space. Obviously you can skip this step if you already have Dropbox.
3. Quit Safari. Safari will get confused if you start messing around with its files while it’s still running.
4. Create a ‘Bookmarks’ folder in Dropbox. It doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as you remember that it’s for your bookmarks.
5. Move the Bookmarks file from Safari to Dropbox. The file is called Bookmarks.plist and is located in [your Home folder]>Library>Safari. Make sure you move it rather than copy it over.
6. Create a symbolic link to the Bookmarks file. To do this, right-click Bookmarks.plist and choose Make Symbolic Link, which is the new option added by SymbolicLinker. Now drag the new file, ‘Bookmarks.plist symlink’, back to where you found the original file. Rename it back to ‘Bookmarks.plist’.

You can now re-open Safari to check that all your bookmarks are still there and that they work properly. Next, repeat these steps on the other computers you want to keep in sync:

1. Download and install SymbolicLinker. Do this exactly the same way as before.
2. Sync the computer with Dropbox. Make sure the new Bookmarks.plist file is completely downloaded before continuing.
3. Quit Safari.
4. Create a symbolic link to the Bookmarks.plist file in Dropbox. Delete the Bookmarks.plist file in Library>Safari and replace it with the symbolic link, again renaming it to simply ‘Bookmarks.plist’.
5. Reopen Safari and check it works. It should work first time, but if it doesn’t, retry the steps, and make sure Bookmarks.plist has a capital ‘B’.

The Terminal Method

Using Terminal (Applications>Utilities>Terminal) achieves exactly the same thing, using the same method, but just doesn’t involve any downloads. For this example, I’m going to put the Bookmarks file into Dropbox>Safari, but it works for any folder. Just switch out the file paths in the Terminal.

1. Create your folder in Dropbox. Again, doesn’t matter what you call it.
2. Move the Bookmarks file into Dropbox. Once again, you need to make sure that you’re moving the file and not copying it, otherwise you get an error saying that the file already exists.
3. Navigate to the Safari folder using Terminal. This can be done by typing (or copying and pasting):

cd ~/Library/Safari

4. Create the symbolic link. Do this by entering the following into Terminal:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Safari/Bookmarks.plist Bookmarks.plist

5. Restart Safari.

The Problem

Unfortunately, the problem with changing the Bookmarks.plist directly is you have to quit and reopen Safari in order to update the bookmarks on each machine. It’s still definitely a lot easier than remembering the bookmarks you’ve got and adding them to your other machines manually. Also, it doesn’t cost $99 a year.

I’m sure that there are a whole bunch of other methods, perhaps using Automator or maybe another service similar to Xmarks, which accomplish the same task. If you know about any of those, please share below.

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It’s simple enough, and requires just one line to be entered into Terminal. Quit iTunes, wait for it to close completely, then fire up Terminal, which can be found under Applications → Utilities. Either type or paste the following code into the Terminal window and hit Return:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1

Now when you reopen iTunes, the ‘traffic light’ controls should be back along the top of the window, side-by-side. It does a lot for keeping the look of OS X consistent across applications. Of course, perhaps this is Apple’s way of telling us that in the next version of the Mac operating system, all the windows are going to be laid out like this.

Should you ever want to restore iTunes 10′s default setting, and put the controls back down the side, enter this code into Terminal (again with iTunes closed):

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -0

Now we have a fix for the window controls, all we need is a setting to bring back the color in the sidebar. If you know a way, shout out in the comments!

Enable SSH

If SSH isn’t enabled on your target machine, send this command through Apple Remote Desktop as root.

/sbin/service ssh start

This will enable SSH until the machine is rebooted.

Start an SSH session

Open up Terminal and make a connection to the target machine using its IP address.

ssh 10.0.0.1

If you’re in an Active Directory environment like me, enter the password that matches your current username you’re logged in with. Otherwise your SSH command will need to pass along a username that exists on the target computer. Something similar to the following.

ssh 10.0.0.1 -l admin

Explore the hard drive

Once you’ve successfully made your connection, check out the disk space with the following command.

df

For our situation, the disk0s2 is what we’re looking at. The HDD is getting pretty full.

In my situation, I know that the most space is probably being wasted in the Users directories so lets head there and get an idea of what’s going on.

cd /Users/

Now let’s run the DU command and see what users have the biggest folder.

sudo du -sh *

You will be prompted for your password, and it may seem to go slowly, but you will get a nice list showing you the size of everyone’s Home folder.

Looks like we’ve found some Home folders that need to be purged. This is also easy to do using Finder but sometimes you can’t disturb the machine and Terminal is perfect for that.

Time again to pop a shell and dig into the deep, geeky Unix internals of OS X with Dig Into Unix. Today we are going to look at two top-shelf power tools for text editing: sed and awk.

Sed is a Stream EDitor, and if you recall our previous Dig Into Unix installment concerning standard streams, you’ll understand that the streams we are talking about are actually just text from one source or another. Sed’s bread and butter is text search and replace, very similary to the “Edit” and “Find…” functions in TextEdit and many other GUI text editors. Unlike those text editors though, sed, by default, will write its output to the screen, or stdout.

As an example, try some basic operations on this string of text:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back.

Save the string of text as a file named test.txt, and type this into the Terminal:
sed s/quick/slow/g test.txt

The fox is now slow on the screen, but not changed in the file itself. To follow the stream, the text came from the file, through sed, and to the screeen. The best set of examples I’ve found for getting right into sed and starting to play with it is the collection of sed one liners hosted at Sourceforge.

Personally, I use sed when I’ve got a large number of configuration files that need to be edited. For example, it might be decided that we do not need our Nagios monitoring system alerting on the a certain statistic. I could go into 100 different files and perform the same action on all of them, or I could rely on a simple shell script and sed to do it for me.


for each in `ls *.cfg`; do
mv $each $each.bak #Safety First!
sed '30,35s/^/#/g' $each.bak > $each
done


This will plow through all of the config files in a certain directory and add a # sign at the beginning of lines 30 through 35, commenting those lines out. Then I can restart Nagios, and if all goes well, delete all of the .bak files created as backups by the script.

While sed operates on lines and regular expressions (the subject of a future Dig Into Unix article!), awk works with fields. When given a stream of text, either from a text file or piped in from another application, awk can manipulate the text and rearrange the words. By default, awk separates the text fields by a space character, but you can use any other character you’d like.

Like sed, awk also has a great collection of one liners, this collection here is a great resource collected by Eric Pement. In my day to day activities, I call on awk when I want to format text for a report or to be input into another application.

To use our quick brown fox example again, we can print only the fourth, third, and second words, in reverse order, with this command:
awk '{ print $4, $3, $2 }' test

That will print out “fox brown quick”. Not very practical or useful. Something more practical might be to manipulate a list of comma separated values. Using the “-F” flag in awk, you can tell awk to separate it’s fields based on the comma, as in:
awk -F, '{ print $1 }' test

Since there are no commas in the test file, this will print the entire string of text. So, we could run this command to take care of that:
sed s/ /,/g test > test2

This will use sed to replace all spaces with commas. The backslash is there to escape a special character, so the space is interpreted literally and not as part of a command. Now, you could use awk to manipulate the string of text as needed.
awk -F, '{ print $7, $8, $9, $10, $5, $6, $1, $2, $3, $4 " did" }' test2

This article has just barely skimmed the surface of what sed and awk can do. There are some rather hefty books dedicated to the pair, this one from O’Reilly has been on my desk for years now. Awk is an entire programming language, but the point of this series is not to teach the in-depth details, it’s just to get your feet wet, and maybe, just maybe leave you thirsting for more. The real rub is that everything that sed and awk can do can also be done, at times more efficiently, with the practical extraction and report language…better known as Perl, which is the subject of a future Dig Into Unix article.

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Aliases in Mac OS X are essentially equivalent to shortcuts in the Windows world. They work by creating a link to an original file located somewhere on your Mac or network and maintain the link even if the original is moved or renamed.

How to Create Aliases

Creating aliases is pretty easy. You can right-click on a file and select “Make Alias” or choose “Make Alias” from the File menu. Viola! You have created an alias, indicated by the shortcut arrow on the icon and the word “alias” appended to the end of the file name.

If you want to create an alias and not have it include “alias” at the end, you can do so by holding down the command and option keys while dragging the desired file to a new location other than the original.

How to Ditch the Arrow

You can easily tell your aliases apart from your original files by the fact that aliases include a little arrow in their icon. For some, this may be a great reminder, but for others who may be creating collections of aliases for custom stacks in the Dock, or other reasons, the arrows may be annoying. Fortunately, with a little trip to the Terminal, we can solve this dilemma.

Essentially what we are going to do is take the graphic files that apply the arrow “badge” onto the icons and rename them so Mac OS X cannot find them. If your system cannot find the arrows, it cannot apply them to your aliases. This modification will affect all aliases on your Mac.

The first step is to fire up Terminal (located in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder). At the command prompt, copy and paste the following line of code.

cd /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources

This navigates to the location where the alias badge icons are stored. Then copy and paste this next line of code. It will require your administrator password after you execute the command.

sudo mv AliasBadgeIcon.icns AliasBadgeIcon_OFF.icns

For Terminal newbies, this command invokes “sudo,” which allows you to run powerful commands as another user, in this case, the “root” user. The “mv” command is Unix-talk for “move files.” In the example above, it simply causes the file to be renamed.

To see the changes, you can either restart your computer, or type in the following line of code. (In my tests using the latest builds of Snow Leopard, I actually had to restart the system to see the results).

killall Finder

To put them back, simply follow the steps again, but when you reach the sudo command, use this line of code.

sudo mv AliasBadgeIcon_OFF.icns AliasBadgeIcon.icns

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Continuing our Dig Into Unix series, we’ve now covered the absolute basics of launching Terminal.app, moving around the file system, looking at files with cat, and learning about commands with man. Now, I’d like to introduce you to the power of vi.

vi (pronounced vee-eye) is a text editor for the command line, and was originally written by Bill Joy in 1976. vi is now part of every single Unix system, including OS X. The version included with Leopard is vim, which stands for Vi iMproved. One of the major problems that vi has faced over the years is that it has a major learning curve. Every action that you take in vi you do with keyboard combos. Since there are so many actions that you can do, it takes awhile to get used to the different keystrokes, but once you do, they become ingrained in your fingers. From time to time, when typing in some other app, I find myself hitting the escape key followed by jjj or hhh trying to move the curser.

Getting Started

To get started, open up Terminal.app and type vi. This starts the editor in command mode. Type i to enter insert mode, and then you can begin typing text into the file. Copy the text from this article and paste it into vi, regular CMD-C / CMD-V will work just fine. This will give you something to work with.

Now that you’ve got some text, it’d probably be good to save it. Hit the escape key to put the editor back into command mode, and type :w newfile.txt. This will create a text file named newfile.txt in your home directory. Press i again, and you can begin typing, starting where you left off. Press escape again.

Navigating Lines

To move to any line of text in vi, you can press the number of the line you want to go to and G. For example, to go to the first line, type 1G. If you type that and the characters “1G” show up on your screen, you are not in command mode, don’t forget to press escape first. To get back to the end of the file, you can just press G by itself. That will bring you to the start of the last line in the file.

• To get to the end of a line, you can press $, and your curser will jump to the end of the line.
• To go to the beginning of the line, you press ^. Now you can jump around the file.
• To move the curser one character at a time, use the four keys h j k and l. h moves one character to the left, j moves one character to the right, k to moves one character up, and l moves one character down.
• To open a line below, you can press o, and to open a line above, O.

Configuration File

These basic text editing commands form the basis of the real strengths of vi, and the reason I continue to use it every day. But to really take advantage of the power of vi, you need to create a configuration file for shortcuts.

Exit out of vi and write the file to disk at the same time by typing :wq! while in command mode. Now, create a new file, and open the file in vi for editing by typing vi .vimrc. The .vimrc file is the configuration file vi reads when starting. The important thing to remember about this configuration file is that you can add any of the commands above into the file, including movement, inserting text, and opening lines, and then map those commands to a keyboard combo. If you are familiar with TextExpander, you’ll follow right along with this concept, but it’s even stronger than that.

We are going to create a single line of text in the file that looks like this:
map ,a 1GiJack Doe^MGuy in Charge^MACME Inc.^M111 Main St.^MAnytown, USA

^M^M^M^MDear Sir,^M^M^M^MSincerely,^M^M^MJohn Doe^[10G i

The line above has been separated into two lines to fit on the page. When you see ^M, that’s not really two characters, it’s only one. It’s the return key, captured in raw form in the config file for use in generating our commands. To capture it, you press Control-V, followed by return. The esc key is also captured above by pressing Control-V and then hitting the escape key. That creates the ^[ character above, and allows us to enter some of the vi commands above into the config. Enter in that line of text above, using the Control-V trick to capture the return and esc characters.

Now, save the new file by typing :wq! in command mode, open up a new file with vi file, and test out your new ,a shortcut. If everything went well, it should look just like the video below.

Worth Learning

The learning curve with vi is steep, but as with most things worth learning, the payoff is significant. This short article has barely scratched the surface of what vi can do. vi can be a full-fledged IDE, or you could use it to write your next book. The mapping features above are especially helpful if you do any programming, or if you manage any Unix or Linux servers. If you’d like to learn more, I’d suggest starting with man vi, and maybe picking up a copy of the O’Reilly book “Learning the vi and Vim Editors.” Of course, I’d be happy to help out as well.

Back when I was first learning Unix, I asked an old graybeard why I should bother learning such a complicated, ancient text editor. He told me that since everything in Unix is a file, and almost all files in Unix are text, I needed some way to edit those files to control the system. Someday, he said, I would find myself without any other text editor, and without any other way to change a file. He was right, since I’m now working as a Unix systems administrator, I’ve been in that position for several years. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate all that vi can do for me.

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Recently, two articles appeared on TechRadar documenting various command line tweaks for various apps and functions of Mac OS X. While I didn’t find anything new there, it’s nice to have two articles that summarize a bunch instead of tracking them down one by one across countless bookmarks.

To be honest, most command line tweaks don’t appeal to me. For example, I’d sooner go back to running DOS than go back to using Safari’s “standard” tabs; I love the tabs on top. Still, it’s nice to know I could make the change if I felt so inclined.

What’s surprising to me is that some of the tweaks I do like are incredibly simple — for example, the command that turns on stack highlighting even when using the mouse (No. eight in the first article above). Obviously, having the cursor over an item tells me which one will be activated if I click, and yet I like the highlight as a further indicator.

I also like the one to remove the arrows from iTunes’ interface (No. seven in the second article). Again, this is a little thing, yet I value it in a manner that’s completely out of proportion to the actual change it makes. Put simply, I hate those arrows.

Meanwhile, there’s a tweak for Safari I really like that’s not in either article. It’s one that forces a click to open in a new tab (instead of a window). You can find that one here. Though documented for Safari 3.1, I use it for the Safari 4 beta with no issues.

I’m curious what you think. Which tweaks do you really like? Do you have any to add, and do they seem like major or minor changes to you?

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As if they were listening for my request, Instant Cocoa released pTerm, which provides support for SSH, Telnet and taw TCP client connections from your iPhone. pTerm is based on PuTTY, one of the more stable & well-known ssh client suites (OS X users can grab that via some ports).

You start new sessions by choosing from the Connections panel:

To get an entry on that panel, you use a very basic configuration screen to enter a display name for the connection, the host (or IP address) and the port you wish to connect on:

For ssh connections, you will receive a warning about host keys that you should be familiar with if you’ve used ssh before (the developers presented this in a great way as it would have been much less iPhone-like to deal with this from within the terminal prompt):

The terminal sessions work in both landscape and portrait modes,

and the xterm emulation worked with “top” (which auto-updates) and “pine” (a terminal-based e-mail reader that does quite a bit of screen manipulation).

The Instant Cocoa devs understood the need for the CTRL key (yay!) and version 1.1 adds support for ESC as well (kinda useful if you choose to use “vi” in the session). Version 1.1 also fixes some instability issues and adds full-screen support (as you can see, the keyboard eats up the majority of the real-estate). They are working on allowing users to customize the terminal sizes/colors, adjust TCP settings, provide support for port forwarding and include ways to use more easily use terminal-specific keys.

Since pTerm is based on PuTTY, we may be able to expect to see significant feature enhancements. I would personally like to see the ability to use RSA/DSA keys and the ability to log sessions (which would require some way to get that log off the iPhone). It would also be great to keep multiple sessions open simultaneously (it’s in the works) and switch between them. Some folks might like the ability to cache credentials or at least the username associated with ssh sessions (not recommended, but it’s a personal-risk-decision one can make). For RAW socket connections, having a way to record and playback keystrokes or define a set of strings to paste into the session would be great for rapid testing of web/internet services.

For me, pTerm is definitely worth $4.99USD, especially if that covers major updates for a while. I’ve only tested it over EDGE, but it worked flawlessly, even with the latency.

If you use pTerm or have some feature requests for it, drop a note in the comments!

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This post covers two of three key programs for managing bandwidth: iftop (a command-line utility) and SurplusMeter (a GUI tool). The third utility – lsof (another command-line utility) – will require a dedicated article in-and-of itself.

How Much Am I Consuming?

SurplusMeter is a small tool from the fine folks over at SkoobySoft with one mission: to show you how much bandwidth you are consuming with the option to enter any known caps to ensure you are not over your limit. You can download SurpluMeter directly from their site. It is a PPC binary compatible down to OS X 10.3.9. For those who want to live life on the wild side, you can grab the source code and compile it yourself. I have built an OS X 10.5 compatible Universal Binary version which you can download via this post. No matter which way you decide to go, it is important to copy the application to your local volume as it runs an agent program – which runs in the background collecting bandwidth data – that will make it difficult to remove mounted volumes if you keep it running.

The main view of SurplusMeter is fairly straightforward. You can set which day to start the monthly tracking period on and specify your known bandwidth cap – which can also include upstream usage. Monitoring can be paused if you know you will be moving between networks, the collected data can be reset and you can even choose which interface to monitor via their “English” names vs OS X short device names (e.g. “Ethernet port” vs “en0“). For my example, I did a short sample of bandwidth on my AT&T 3G ExpressCard, hence the PPP modem selection. If there were hiccups during program execution or you know of other bandwidth usage on your connection not emanating from your Mac, you can add bytes to the current data collector.

Similarly, you can also remove bytes if you were measuring data on an interface that moved between networks.

SurplusMeter is kind enough to store its data in ~/Library/Application Support/SurplusMeter/surplusmeter_data.plist in a very human- and machine-readable format (a well-annoted Apple plist) so you can do what you like with it:

In general, it is a great, special purpose utility to have around.

What’s Going On Here?

SurplusMeter tells you that you are using bandwidth, but does not provide any further details. This is where tool number two – iftop – comes into play. You can grab a pre-built package of iftop (“interface top”) from AFP548.com or grab the source and try your hand at building it (you may need to download some support libraries). Users of various “ports” tools should be able to find iftop in one of the repositories.

Where the command-line tool top provides a mechanism for determining what processes are consuming precious system resources (in a very similar fashion to the Activity Monitor application), iftop does something similar for network usage on a particular interface.

You will need some more technical information to run iftop successfully. First, you will need to know which network interface you want to monitor. To find out which interfaces you have on your system, open Terminal.app and run the command:

ifconfig -l

My output from that shows:

lo0 gif0 stf0 en0 fw0 en1 vmnet8 vmnet1 ppp0

Interface en0 generally is equivalent to “Ethernet” and en1 is usually equivalent to your AirPort card. ppp0 would refer to most modems, including 3G cards. Additional interfaces may be related to a VMware or Parallels install, your local firewall interface or other local types of network devices.

With Terminal.app open, run iftop -h to see what the command line options are for the tool:

Synopsis: iftop -h | [-npbBP] [-i interface] [-f filter code] [-N net/mask]

   -h                  display this message
   -n                  don't do hostname lookups
   -N                  don't convert port numbers to services
   -p                  run in promiscuous mode (show traffic between other
                       hosts on the same network segment)
   -b                  don't display a bar graph of traffic
   -B                  Display bandwidth in bytes
   -i interface        listen on named interface
   -f filter code      use filter code to select packets to count
                       (default: none, but only IP packets are counted)
   -F net/mask         show traffic flows in/out of network
   -P                  show ports as well as hosts
   -m limit            sets the upper limit for the bandwidth scale
   -c config file      specifies an alternative configuration file

For this example, the most useful options are “-i” to let us choose which interface to monitor and “-P” to show which ports are in use. The tool requires elevated privileges to work so you have to run the following to start your view: sudo iftop -P -i ppp0 (again, replace “ppp0” with “en0” or “en1” or whatever interface you need to monitor).

You should see something similar to the following screen upon successful execution (minus the annotation):

The main part of the display lists, for each pair of hosts, the rate at which data has been sent and received over the preceding 2, 10 and 40 second intervals. The direction of data flow is indicated by arrows, <= and =>. So in this example, where I started iTunes just after kicking off iftop, we can see that:

• 166.129.237.160 (my local machine) made a series of http (web) requests to Apple servers
• some of Apple’s servers do not resolve from IP addresses to host names
• the average transfer rate over 40 seconds is between 0.2 kilobytes and 9 kilobytes per second

After quitting iTunes and running for a while, then letting it sit “idle” (not actively doing network activity), you can see that the pattern of usage can change dramatically.

While iftop can let you see more of what is going on, it cannot tell you which applications or processes are causing the usage. You can infer quite a bit (i.e. http traffic is most likely coming from your browser – but this is not necessarily the case as shown by the last screen), but finding out core details is where lsof can be of real value and will be covered in our next installment.

While I have presented a free way to monitor bandwidth usage, Guy Meyer has a set of tools – Net Monitor & Net Monitor Sidekick which do something similar but are not free (the Sidekick program is in beta which is expired so I was not able to test it).

If you are using any of these or similar tools to monitor bandwidth utilization, drop a note in the comments to share your insights with TAB readers and keep an eye out for our post on lsof!

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• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

I rebooted my Macbook Pro about four days ago, and lo, to my surprise, the icon for my boot drive had vanished. I was, too say the least, slightly perturbed. (To the right, the culprit.)

I tried all the quick-fix things – changed what showed in Finder, tried to get it back through Finder – it was gone there too – and finally, I sucked it up and called Apple. Three calls to Apple – and two instances of being hung up on – a clean install of Leopard, and multitudinous Google searches later, I had found two things: a lot of other people were having these issues, all starting about the same time as mine, and, more importantly, a solution.

So first, the solution, and then the explanation of what it is, what it does, and what that means for all of us Mac users.

To get your startup drive back, you need to run two Terminal commands. One of them requires that you have an Administrator password. I’d generally try to give you a solution that didn’t require Terminal, given some peoples’ squishiness about that, but I can’t find another frontend to this. (There’s an Applescript running around, but it doesn’t work, really.)

First, run xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment /***

In this case the *** signifies the name of your missing drive, as this command will work for any drive. If you want your startup drive, all you need is the slash.

Next, run sudo chflags nohidden /*** Same deal with the asterisks, though in this case, another important modification is that it doesn’t need to be run as sudo unless you’re running it on your root drive.

Log out and/or restart, and your icon should be back to stay.

Now, what that all means. As it turns out, the culprit in all this is a simple metadata flag, the hidden flag. This is the same flag that hides the .DS_store files and other things that you’d rather not see floating about your operating system all the time. The problem, in this case, is a change in how Leopard handles that flag, and metadata in general.

Leopard marks a very interesting shift in how Apple’s chosen to deal with the increasing amounts of complicated metadata that we’re all generating. In past years, this has been stored in .DS_store files, for the most part. Tiger added the xattr function family and API’s to play with some, and some people, namely Marquis Logan and John Siracusa, then wrote up some nice little tools that made this accessible to all of us.

In Leopard, there is now a native command for this. There are four flags to the xattr command, at least so far as I’ve been able to tell. (There is no man page for this, but -h works.) They are -l, -p, -w, and -d, and all of them are written out as xattr -flag file [file path]. -L lists the names of all extended attributes on the file. -P, used with -l, prints them. -W is written out as xattr -w attribute_name attribute_value file [file path], and changes the chosen value to whatever you specify. -D, the important one for the above command, simply deletes all extended attributes. The first command, then, deletes all the extended attributes on the given file. The com.apple.metadata.kMDItemFinderComment contains, among other things, the flags for drives in Finder.

The second command, the chflags command, resets the hidden flag on the given file. Two different methods of getting at two different types of metadata, in essence. The second command is found in a couple of places if you google this, but it by itself doesn’t keep the job done. Without the xattr command, the hidden flag resets every time Finder does.

Now, how this happens? I don’t know. I’m working on that – but I suspect that Apple may be too. And in the meantime, I’ve already found some neat things people are doing with it now. Anyone for a way to kill that annoying ‘this program has been downloaded from the internet’ message?

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• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

OS X changed all that, since Apple managed to make Unix look very good while keeping all of the real power that lies beneath the GUI.Now, one may be able to argue the aesthetics of  Leopard (hey, Panic should be happy, it took Leopard to finally drive me into purchasing CandyBar), but none can dispute the gems that await those who dare to invoke the Terminal, and I’ll be taking the opportunity over some of the coming posts to dwell on the nuggets that bear a deeper look. For those that are not as comfortable with the more textual side of their systems, I’ll be making these trips as painless as possible (you may not need to delve into the Utilities folder to find the Terminal icon at all).

The first stop is a little utility called opensnoop. Leopard ships with something called DTrace that gives developers and administrators the ability to take a peek at what all running code is doing in a flexible and dynamic way. Giving DTrace the coverage it deserves is beyond a simple blog post, but there are some smaller utilities – like opensnoop – that take advantage of the power of DTrace, but on a more targeted scale which are worthy of a minor exposition.The main purpose of the opensnoop utility is to provide a report of file opens as they occur. Curious as to what really happens when Safari opens a web page? Want to see what files are accessed from that latest program you downloaded? You can find the answers with opensnoop.

If you can get to a terminal prompt, the simplest way to see what this utility does is to just type:

sudo opensnoop 

Non-Terminal folks can just run the OpenSnoop.app application from the OpenSnoop App Archive (354KB ZIP file). (Either way, you’ll be asked to enter your password since opensnoop requires higher-level privileges to run.)

Output will look something like the following, though your listing contents should be very different:

UID    PID COMM            FD PATH 
501    286 SystemUIServer  17 /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Spaces.menu/Contents/Resources/SpacesBackground.pdf
501    218 Finder          11 /.vol/234881026/571978
501    286 SystemUIServer  17 /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Spaces.menu/Contents/Resources/SpacesBackground.pdf
501    286 SystemUIServer  17 /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Spaces.menu/Contents/Resources/SpacesBackground.pdf
0      110 WindowServer     4 /var/log/windowserver.log 
0      110 WindowServer     4 /var/log/windowserver.log 
501    286 SystemUIServer  17 /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Spaces.menu/Contents/Resources/SpacesBackground.pdf

For each line:

• UID is the numerical ID of the owner of program that has the file opened.
• PID is the process ID of the program that has the file open
• COMM is the actual name of the process (this is something we care about)
• FD is the numerical file descriptor (ID) of the file being accessed
• PATH is the full OS X path to the file being accessed (this is also something we care about)

The sample output is what occurred when I switched to/from Spaces 1 & 3. Just that simple case shows how interesting opensnoop can be since we see that the SystemUIServer and WindowServer were both invoked when I worked just a little bit with Spaces and that SpacesBackground.pdf was loaded from one of the Spaces app bundles.

While this is useful in-and-of itself, we can use opensnoop for more targeted and detailed inspection. The following command:

sudo opensnoop -avgn Safari

(Non-Terminal users can run the SnoopSafari.app from the archive)

Produces the following output when I tell it to go to google.com:

TIME           STRTIME                UID    PID  FD ERR PATH                 ARGS
8071248908     2008 Jan 10 21:33:13   501   1153  17   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db-journal Safari
8071249029     2008 Jan 10 21:33:13   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari Safari
8071249636     2008 Jan 10 21:33:13   501   1153  24   0 /var/tmp/etilqs_rjFUOz2TEh7AaoG Safari
8075981916     2008 Jan 10 21:33:18   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/.tracked filenames.plist Safari
8075982865     2008 Jan 10 21:33:18   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/http:%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2F.webhistory Safari
8075983663     2008 Jan 10 21:33:18   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/http:%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F.webhistory Safari
8075984521     2008 Jan 10 21:33:18   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/.tracked filenames.plist Safari
8075980917     2008 Jan 10 21:33:18   501   1153  18   0 /.vol/234881026/713654 Safari
8077969298     2008 Jan 10 21:33:19   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/.dat0481.441 Safari
8077966383     2008 Jan 10 21:33:19   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/.dat0481.440 Safari
8080982146     2008 Jan 10 21:33:23   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/lock/.dat0481.442 Safari
8080983115     2008 Jan 10 21:33:23   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/lock/details.plist Safari
8081191826     2008 Jan 10 21:33:23   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/lock/details.plist Safari
8081192743     2008 Jan 10 21:33:23   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/lock Safari
8081193635     2008 Jan 10 21:33:23   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/.de0481.443 Safari

The extra fields are the Unix-coded time, the translated timestamp, the error code (if any) and the file being accessed. This is a more verbose listing, but we will not see any file data from application other than Safari. You can substitute “Adium” or “Finder”, etc for “Safari” on the command line and I’ve included SnoopAdium.app, SnoopFinder.app and SnoopFirefox.app within the archive.

Hopefully, you are beginning to see the power of this small utility.While there are many options for you to explore within opensnoop, one of the more interesting ones is the “-x” flag, which only displays the failed opens (I’ve included SnoopFailed.app in the archive as well). It’s always good to peek at what applications are looking for but cannot find, especially if you are having trouble with your system or a particular application.I’m working on a more generic GUI front-end to opensnoop and will let you know when I have something worth sharing.

These apps were all built with the extremely useful Platypus tool (which is in my developer folder once again post-Leopard install). If there’s a particular “snoop” app you’d like me to whip up, drop a note in the comments and I’ll do my best to crank’em out (I’ll post the other apps either on my .Mac iDisk or my personal site).

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