While moving selected local files and folders to iCloud I came across a folder on my Mac containing a large number of documents some of which appeared to be duplicates of those on iCloud. Before deciding which ones to move, I wanted to check each one to see if it already existed on iCloud.
Every so often – usually around the time of a major new macOS release – I perform a clean install of the OS on my Macs. Along with restoring user data I tend to restore the configuration data of certain applications including the Microsoft Office applications. While this is a great timesaver, it can also cause some unexpected results. For example, the Recent file lists in Excel, PowerPoint and Word. Let’s use Word as an example.
It’s no secret that Desktop icons can be hidden in macOS, but unlike many user-configurable options neither System Preferences nor the Finder‘s preferences provide a way to toggle their display. It’s true that the Desktop display of drive icons and some device icons can be controlled through the Finder, but in this context Desktop icons refer to all icons shown on the Desktop including those that represent folders, files or symbolic links.
Prior to OS X Mavericks 10.9 a user’s Desktop image was stored in com.apple.desktop.plist located in the ~/Library/Preferences/ folder and changed from the command line using:
defaults write com.apple.desktop Background '{default = {ImageFilePath = "/path/to/desktop/image.jpg";};}'
In the Clock tab of the Date & Time pane of System Preferences you can choose between displaying a digital or analog clock in the menu bar. For a digital clock there are five options that determine how the date and time are displayed:
Type the query add recents dock terminal into any Internet search engine and most – if not all – relevant entries on the first results page will give the following code or a slight variation of it:
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{"tile-data" = {"list-type" = 1;}; "tile-type" = "recents-tile";}'; killall Dock
Most of these articles are from 2015 or earlier and the Mac OS has changed a lot since, but the code still appears to do exactly as advertised.
I had a situation where I needed to pass code to Python in the form of a single command instead of a script file. While this is easily done by invoking Python in command mode, the code contained a conditional statement that caused Python to throw an error.
Before selling my late 2015 27″ iMac Retina 5K I wanted to secure erase its 1TB Fusion Drive consisting of a 24GB SSD and 1TB HDD. Secure erasing an HDD is simple enough using the Security Options in Disk Utility, but for Fusion Drives and SSDs this option is not available. To secure erase the iMac’s HDD I first needed to break the Fusion Drive into its constituent parts using Terminal.
Having recently changed my local testing server environment from XAMPP to MAMP v2.0.5 I wanted to change the password for the MySQL root user. By default it’s set to root.
Changing the MySQL password for the root user was straightforward enough, but locating and editing the files to reflect the new password was a different story. Failure to update all the necessary files results in MAMP reporting the following error:
/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqlcheck: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES) when trying to connect
The one thing that trips me up time and again when using the command line in Terminal or other terminal emulator is being able to navigate the directory structure and target files or folders. After struggling getting the correct file or folder path I’m usually greeted with No such file or directory reminding me that the command line doesn’t like spaces in file and folder paths.
With that in mind here are a few ways to enter file and folder paths on the command line.
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