kitak / tools-osx

A small collection of command line tools for Mac OS X, incl.: clipcat, dict, eject, ql, swuser, trash & with.

tools-osx README

by Morgan Aldridge [e-mail]

OVERVIEW

A small collection of command line tools that I've developed for Mac OS X over the years, à la NextStep/Mac OS X's open, pbcopy, pbpaste, etc. These are mostly bash scripts as an exercise in honing my bash-fu, but a number of Perl & Ruby scripts have been submitted by others.

TOOLS

clipcat

clipcat prints and concatenates Mac OS Text Clippings. Submitted by David Kendal https://gist.github.com/705623.

dict

dict performs a look-up in Mac OS X's included dictionary. Note: unlike the other scripts provided, this one requires that you have MacRuby installed http://macruby.org/. Submitted by David Kendal.

eject

eject ejects a volume or network volume and all other volumes on the same local device. A shorter, simpler, smarter wrapper of diskutil's various eject/unmount options and allows specifying either a full path in /Volumes or just the volume name.

ql

ql opens files with Mac OS X's Quick Look feature.

swuser

swuser switches users using Mac OS X's Fast User Switching feature. You can either switch out to the login window or to another user. Note: unfortunately, this is not currently compatible with screen.

trash

trash allows trashing of files instead of tempting fate with rm. Correctly handles trashing files on other volumes, uses the same filename renaming scheme as Finder for duplicate file names, can list trash contents w/disk usage summary, and empty trash (including securely) w/confirmation. Does not require Finder to be running.

with

with sets the application with which specified documents will be opened. It can even change and open in one fell swoop. Submitted by David Kendal.

INSTALLATION

1. Download and extract the tools.
2. Run rake.
3. Run sudo rake install. (If you have write permission on /usr/local/bin, you don't need to sudo.)

OTHER TOOLS

Looking for other Mac OS X-specific command line tools to complement these? Check out the following:

• appswitch & launch by Nicholas Riley
• asprint, icalBuddy, setWeblocThumb, and trash by Ali Rantakari
• iloc by Nate Weaver
• ithief by Israel Chauca Fuentes
• osxiconutils (geticon, icns2pict, pict2icns, seticon) & osxutils (cpath, getfcomment, geticon, google, hfsdata, lsmac, mkalias, rcmac, setfcomment, setfctypes, setfflags, seticon, setlabel, setsuffix, setvolume, trash, wiki, wsupdate) by Sveinbjorn Thordarson
• rem by Kevin Y. Kim
• service by David Kendal
• trash by Dave Dribin
• webkit2png by Paul Hammond

SPECIAL THANKS

Special thanks to: David Kendal for all his submissions and collaboration; Matt Brictson for his initial relative path bug fix in trash.