Regardless of the number of storage devices you have attached or built into your Mac, you will likely use Disk Utility for formatting them when necessary, to partition and resize them for various purposes, and otherwise managing them. However, one limitation you might find when using Disk Utility is that it will only act on one drive or volume at a time. Continue reading
The Terminal is generally reserved as an environment for advanced configuration of your Mac, but there are those who resort to it on a regular basis and use it in conjunction with OS X’s graphical interface to make optimal use of the system. If you do so, then you might find yourself periodically wanting to launch an application, either directly from the command line, or from an automated action like a script. In addition, you can use this feature to launch multiple instances of a standard OS X program, or run it as a different user, such as root, which can give you access to the system in ways you might otherwise not have. Continue reading
When you run any command in the OS X Terminal, you are running some program that has been coded and compiled to perform a specific function, be it something simple like “ls” to list directory contents, or something more interactive like “top” to display information on running processes. These commands are all programs on your Mac, just like applications such as Pages, Word, TextEdit, and Safari that have graphical interfaces and are the main productivity programs you use when running OS X. Continue reading