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Terminal uses in everyday life?

P

_pb_boi

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 25, 2004
382
0
Hey people,

Thought I'd throw in a question here; what do you all use the terminal for, in every day life? I don't mean just a one-off app that requires terminal use, but something you'd use every day - what has you keeping a terminal window open all day?

Personally, I only use the terminal for coding and stuff... just wanna know what your terminal usage habits are!

andy
 
1) running top :D
2) killing things
3) ssh-ing in to different servers
4) ifconfig is easier than opening the network preferences
5) netstat
6) vi
7) moving stuff, copying stuff, i tend to do it faster at the cli
8) checking disk usage "sudo du -k / | sort -nr | less "
9) compiling and installing things that dont come with fink
 
switchingGeek said:
1) running top :D
2) killing things
3) ssh-ing in to different servers
4) ifconfig is easier than opening the network preferences
5) netstat
6) vi
7) moving stuff, copying stuff, i tend to do it faster at the cli
8) checking disk usage "sudo du -k / | sort -nr | less "
9) compiling and installing things that dont come with fink
Click to expand...

Too bad I don't even KNOW what any of those things are except 2, much less how to do them :eek: :( :confused:
 
howard said:
what does SSH mean?
Click to expand...
ssh is secured shell login..in english u can login to any unix, linux or mac os x system by
ssh ip
i use terminal predominantly for
ssh..i connect to my linux box at school..
top..actually i use geektool to display top output on the desktop..
also to open any program thats in my applications folder..i hv written a simple shell script fr that, with help from some members here..and its much better...

#!/bin/sh
read -p "which app >> " name
cd /
cd applications
if open "$name".app
then
#successful
:
else
#not found
cd /Applications/Utilities
open "$name".app
fi

save this file as z.sh
and then at terminal write
./z.sh
it wd open any app...cool fr my purposes..

cheers
 
SSH, FTP, SCP, top, uptime, top, vim, and of course, snake/tetris/doctor on emacs :)

I also work faster in CLI and use it for many Finder jobs.
 
concatenate

I use the terminal to concatenate all the time. Concatenate is just a fancy word for joining a bunch of individual files in to one big one. When you download any large file like a movie from usenet, it is always cut into little peices for succesful transmition. When you get all the peices you gotta put'em back together in to one big file again. Just throw em all in to a folder and type cat * >FileNameHere.mpg and viola, all the peices are sewn back together again. Don't know what usenet is? If you aren't afraid of getting a little geeky, download an app called hogwasher and spend some time figuring things out, you won't regret it.
 
I use Terminal for SSH and sometimes FTP, and a lot of the time I'm running Folding@Home. Sometimes it's cool to run Top and put it in fullscreen. With green text and a black background my mom thinks i'm a crazy computer genius, lol.
 
I find terminal much quicker to use for standard file tasks than finder itself. Browsing files, quickly editing files, opening files with a specific application ('open -a /Applications/... file.extension) is much more productive.

Also, I make extreme* use of scp, sftp and wget for networking and downloading off the internet (wget is much better than clicking 400 links on a page, when I can get all the files with one simple command!)


- Cheers, A.
 
Thanks for the replies guys :)

Today I'll be using it to reschedule my cron from 5am lol... also, I use it for Finder stuff - grep is much quicker, and sorts alphabetically :)

And yeah, I ssh from terminal and MUD. Suppose I use it slightly more than I thought I guess :)

andy
 
I use SSH all the time, for my website, for when I'm away from home, between computers on my LAN... I usually need it for running top/killing processes, using pico occasionally, and also to browse/open files sometimes.
 
ssh/sftp/whois

Two main uses (when I'm not compiling programming projects):
- ssh/sftp into my school account
- whois to find the _real_ sender whenever I get a virus infected e-mail

I also use commands like ping and ifconfig when there is something fishy with my network settings...
 
Long live vi!

Yes switchinguy, vi is the ultimate use for the terminal! Death to Emacs!
 
switchingGeek said:
1) running top :D
2) killing things
3) ssh-ing in to different servers
4) ifconfig is easier than opening the network preferences
5) netstat
6) vi
7) moving stuff, copying stuff, i tend to do it faster at the cli
8) checking disk usage "sudo du -k / | sort -nr | less "
9) compiling and installing things that dont come with fink
Click to expand...

whoa!! thats the exact same things that I use terminal for! :eek:

o.. almost forgot pico! :rolleyes:
 
Since I do *NIX for a living, I use terminal all the time. I usually have 10 ssh sessions going. God I love my powerbook..... (and of course one of those terminals is my folding :) ).

Kimo
 
For SSHing, I've made a folder with a dozen or so .term files, and I keep that folder down on the dock. I can right-click on the folder, choose a .term, and have quick access to all the servers I cause trouble on. Different .terms let me set different colors and such, so it's quite nice.

Local term use includes a lot of tcpdump, since I'm trying to figure out which of my many net applications are sending and receiving at any given moment (I'm on snailband, so bandwidth is at a premium)
 
top
pkill (a little script to kill a process by the app name instead of pid)
ftp
curl

i use the command-line ftp for web-site maintenance because it's quicker than a gui program. i use curl as my download manager if i'm getting a big file and don't want to burden safari with it.
 
psst! Installing the free open source tool anacron is a better way to do this.
Click to expand...

Westsideguy - cheers, I'll download and install that tool :)

The reason I did it the CLI way was just basically to experiment some with sudo, and to get used to usin the CLI for something other than programme compilation, I guess. :)

Thanks again man,

andy
 
Oh man.

ssh/sftp, mysql, file browsing (OS X's "open" command is freaking great), top, kill, fink

Random commands I realized I can't be without after running history:

nslookup/dig, nmap, ping, file, man, ps, cat
 
abhishekit said:
i hv written a simple shell script fr that, with help from some members here..and its much better...
Click to expand...

Nice work but the open command can already do this.

Run "open -a itunes" (not even case sensitive) and see what happens.
 
motulist said:
I use the terminal to concatenate all the time. Concatenate is just a fancy word for joining a bunch of individual files in to one big one. When you download any large file like a movie from usenet, it is always cut into little peices for succesful transmition. When you get all the peices you gotta put'em back together in to one big file again. Just throw em all in to a folder and type cat * >FileNameHere.mpg and viola, all the peices are sewn back together again. Don't know what usenet is? If you aren't afraid of getting a little geeky, download an app called hogwasher and spend some time figuring things out, you won't regret it.
Click to expand...

I guess its too much to hope that this works if the file is in rar format
 
soulshriek said:
I guess its too much to hope that this works if the file is in rar format
Click to expand...

It doesn't matter what format the files are in, they'll concatenate the same way regardless of file type. But I doubt you really want to concatenate several rar files. If you have files named rar1, rar2, etc or something similar then that is a multipart rar file, not a split file that needs concatenating. Any unrar utility should be able to unrar those files together just fine.
 
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