Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with terminal

Help me batch print text files on the Mac

grumblebee — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:19:03 -0800

OS X: I want to batch print all the files in a source-code library. They are actionscript files, which means they are text files that all end in a .as extension. The files are in a complex directory structure (one root folder but files in multiple subfolders), and there are non .as files that I don't want printed. When the files print, I need some kind of separator ( spaces, asterisks, new page...) between each file. I can't seem to find a FILTERABLE batch printing app for OSX -- one that can print all files (of a certain type or naming scheme) in all folders and subfolders starting at a certain root.

I thought about opening Terminal and doing this:

find . -name "*.as" | xargs cat > outfile.txt

And then printing outfile.txt. That would be perfect except that I won't easily be able to tell where one file begins and another ends. I need

*****************

or some other delimiter between files.

If it matters, this is for OS X Leopard.

Please help a n00b!

The Light Fantastic — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:16:41 -0800

I will be flying to Poland on Friday from San Francisco (SFO) on United with a transfer to LOT at JFK. Do I check in at the domestic or international terminal? Does this first leg of the flight count as domestic or international? I'm very confused.

Severe mac/python question

emptyinside — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:34:02 -0800

So I was fiddling with commands in the python interpreter via the Terminal. I ran this basically, and was messing with the help system. fileHandle = open ( 'test.txt', 'w' ) ; fileHandle.write (' asdasd^3 '); fileHandle.close(); And all of a sudden this application opened. Python shell is it's name, it has no icon. WTF is going on?

I have two friends; their parents are (separately) dying. How to help? Neither are in U.S./U.K./CAN.

taz — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:04:37 -0800

I would like to help my friends, if I can; two of them are individually dealing with incredibly stressful and sad health-related situations related to their parents. Friend one: I know her very well (via internet). Her father is dying, and it's end-stage, but it may take months and months. It's a terrible situation, because he's at home (as per his wish), and when he can speak, only says he wants to die. They have medical care, there's not a problem of money, but in terms of emotional pain and stress for her and her mother, it's dire. Their extended family live on another continent, and my friend's closest friends have all moved far away recently, so it's really just her and her mom dealing with this, essentially in isolation in terms of emotional support (and her mom is an expat, and I understand how this can be even more isolating and limiting). How can I help her? Are there any books that were valuable to you if you were any sort of similar situation? Is there an online forum that is high-quality, smart, helpful, warm, for people in this position? I doubt that there are support groups where she is, or much of that sort of help at all. (If you want to know what country, email or memail me, but I'm pretty sure it's not promising.)

My friend is a very smart, strong woman, career-successful in a highly sexist culture, so has an amazing amount of daily stress with her job, and must remain always calm, cool, always in control... which makes me worry about her even more, since now she has to also practice the same stoicism at home, day in and day out, and night after night. I know she can barely sleep, and there's no possibility of getting away from it. She can take time from the job, but she can't go away, and that would just leave her at home 24/7 with that special suffering.

Any advice about how to help very gratefully accepted.

Friend 2: I don't know so well, an internet acquaintance from a BB, and he might well be scamming, but I really don't think so. (2.5 years at that site* and always generous and giving as a poster; never talking about his personal/private stuff at all; never talking about money or any personal trouble at all. An on-topic friendly, helpful guy.)

His mother needs a transplant; he has most of the money, but lacks about $5,000 U.S. He appealed to the BB we both frequent, but of course the discussion was shut down. I told him to check out Modest Needs, after checking that they had "outside of U.S." and also "urgent health care" categories. But he told me that they do not extend their services to his country (India). Is there anything similar that he might look into? It just kills me that $5,000 might save his mom's life, though, yes, I realize that this is repeated a million times all over the world.

Don't worry about me, I don't have money to give away, but if there is any other sort of organization that vetts requests and makes it easy to donate (paypal), or any other options to check out, I'd like to tell him about it.

*: This BB is not metafilter or metachat; the person is not a metaverse person

I think I got a bug from a torrent

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:04:31 -0800

I've tried illegally downloading an application, and I'm pretty sure it is intent on messing up my computer and/or stealing my infos. Here's the catch- I'm runny the latest version of Leopard OS_X. In an effort to get a pretty expensive application that I've wanted for a long time, I downloaded a torrent containing said application. After the cracking program opened and didn't do anything, I became immediately suspiscious. So, long story short, I opened up good old terminal (which I'm somewhat familiar with) and my command line prompt addressed me as a user I don't recognize. This kind of scared the crap out of me, as it seems like something a trojan-esque virus might do. Since the incident I haven't used any passwords or done anything that requires authentication, and I don't plan on doing so until I've got this figured out.

I'm not sure this would be such a predicament for me if I weren't running Leopard, since there are plenty of anti-virus tools for Windows. But
I've been googling about virus scanners for leopard, or virus removal for leopard and can't really find anything.

So, hive mind OS_X experts- How can I diagnose whether I really do have a problem on my shameful hands, and if so, how can I fix it? Are there any good generic diagnosis / removal tools I should look into purchasing (legally, of course!) ?

Is it possible that the cracking program I used did something to my root user so that it could perform its crack, and that it was not malicious at all?
Also, should I be concerned that the damage has already been done? perhaps my hard drive has already been scanned for information which has been sent to whomever wants it?

I've created a follow up email here: ithinkihaveabadbug@gmail.com which I will be glad to follow up on. please hope me with whatever suggestions you may have!

Fixed-width Arabic fonts.

nebulawindphone — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:52:47 -0800

There are a couple fixed-width Unicode Arabic fonts out there. The ones I've seen are pretty hard on the eyes, though, especially at small sizes. Any suggestions for a really readable one? (The goal, FWIW, is to be able to work with mixed Arabic/Latin-alphabet text in a terminal window without going blind or blowing the Latin text up to a ridiculous size.)

Merging folders in OS X

Silky Slim — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:49:01 -0800

Please help me merge two folders on my mac. Two mp3 folders. One internal, one external. Many duplicates. Many unique files.
What's the simplest way of merging them on the external drive without losing anything?
Googling has led me to the Terminal's mv command, which seems to be the simplest solution. I was just wary because of the delicate nature of the operation. Can someone post an example of the exact syntax I would need to use?
Or perhaps another (free) solution?
Also, I'm sure some of my files have been updated on my mac. Can I also make it so newer files replace older ones?
Many thanks in advance.

what does terminal velocity feel like?

compound eye — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:07:40 -0800

what does terminal velocity feel like? when I'm in a lift or a plane, that falls suddenly i feel my stomach 'float'.
I guess what I'm feeling is, in addition to what my inner ear senses, that my internal organs which normally weigh down on whatever is supporting them, stop pressing down because my whole body is accelerating under gravity.

Which has got me wondering about terminal velocity, if you jump out of a plane and free fall to terminal velocity, what does it feel like?

I figure once you reach terminal velocity the air must be putting a force on your body equivalent to the force from the ground when your lying down. Do you stop feeling weightless?

Do you notice the moment when you reach terminal velocity?

Catastrophe

Scattercat — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:40:10 -0800

As a purely hypothetical question, if a five-pound cat were to fall from an arbitrarily tall point, how long would it take him to reach terminal velocity? How fast would he be traveling at that point? Part II: If, say, someone was standing at the initial point, how long would it take the cat to drop completely out of sight? What is the longest distance an unaided human eye can perceive an armload-sized object, in other words? Assume the area is lit at about a 60-Watt bulb in a uniform manner. No cats were or will be harmed in the answering of this question. I'm just very bad at math and am unable to come up with any kind of sensible answer to a physics question posed by an acquaintance. I'm hoping someone in the hivemind will be better able to explain physics to me.

How do I reverse my blunderings?

cmoj — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:30:29 -0800

How do I reverse these terminal commands in osx? I (apparently incoetently) followed the instructions on this blog post. Specifically i did this:

ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts
ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/sys
ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/user

Now GIMP doesn't open. I understand exactly as much about these commands as is explained in that post. So how do I fix it?
I assume that re-downloading GIMP would do nothing since I changed something in the osx terminal.

I want to help the Fox and the Bird

photomusic86 — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 22:19:17 -0800

What do i need to learn to make add-ons of my own for Firefox and/or Songbird? I'm interested in using my computer skills to improve my favorite open source programs. Unfortunately, I don't know a damn thing about coding, programing, writing lines, terminal, etc. I need to know, where's a good place to start?
I run a Mac OSX 10.5 on an early 2008 MacBook Pro, if you have something system specific. Thanks Hive!

How can I monitor a disc rewrite process in Ubuntu?

carsonb — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 07:45:38 -0800

I'm using Terminal (Ubuntu 8.04x64) right now to overwrite a 500g external hd with random information. There's been no action aside from a blinking cursor (by itself on a line, not in front of any prompt) since I entered the command yesterday afternoon:
[sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdc bs=8m]

I understand it's going to take a while to finish. In the meantime, is there any way to monitor the progress of the operation?

I don't need no stinking scrollbars.

Venadium — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:20:52 -0800

Why can't I get rid of the Terminal's scrollbar in OS X 10.5? I'm pretty sure I had this figured out in 10.4, but I just noticed today that the scrollbar is back and I can't get rid of it. None of the older tricks work, and the one Leopard-specific one I did find (downloading some App called Deeper) didn't work either.

Just to be clear, I want to get rid of the scrollbar itself, not the scrollback buffer. I understand one of the earliest ways to get rid of the scrollbar was to just set the buffer to 0 but that's not what I'd like to do.

OSX: Future as a programmer dashed by failure to interpret Terminal error

metajc — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:49:53 -0800

Multiple sources credit this Hivelogic post as the definitive guide to getting MySQL up and running on a Mac OS X. But I can't get past the first few steps. I am not a programmer. But I wish I was; they earn more than me and have the best office in the building. I know HTML and CSS and basic PHP. I have been trying out a bunch of Ruby, Python, Django, and PHP tutorials lately but they're all kind of useless because they're not directly applicable to a hosted, "live site" environment that I'm used to ... So, I'm trying to install MySQL on my Intel Macs running 10.5.4 (powerbook and imac) to have a local testing environment but BANG I'm an idiot and I cannot get through this apparently simple tutorial. Of course, the comments are closed and my Googling yields no answer. I was about to give up when I remembered my good friends over here.

Here's what happens, I try to download and build MySQL as instructed:

curl -O http://mysql.he.net/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/mysql-5.0.45.tar.gz
tar xzvf mysql-5.0.45.tar.gz

But I get the following error:

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

I've tried downloading newer versions of MySQL but I just don't know what I'm doing.

In OS X, how to open an application with command line arguments?

Izner Myletze — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:01:59 -0800

OS X terminal help. How do I open an application with command line arguments? Application FOO supports a number of command line arguments. From OS X's terminal,

$ open FOO.app (this works fine)

$ open FOO.app -r
open [470] No such file: /Users/Izner Myletze/ -r

$ open 'FOO.app -k'
open[471] No such file: /Users/Izner Myletze/FOO.app -k

How do I start FOO with -r or -k?

Help me outsmart a dumb terminal

edmz — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:05:29 -0800

Help me setup an old Wyse Terminal. A point of sale system I want to setup has support for dumb terminals. I got a hold of a Link MC5 terminal that seems to be compatible with the software I have.

My problem is I don't know how to set it up and I haven't been able to find a manual for it on the internets.

If I turn on the terminal, all I get is some text that reads "*FDX Main".

The terminal is connected to the correct serial port of the PC (which is running windows xp). What am I missing?

looking for a decent windows terminal

jenkinsEar — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:53:23 -0800

I'm looking for an alternative to windows' CMD window/terminal. It isn't the shell itself that has me annoyed (although it stinks and monad is an improvement), but the terminal window. I'd love to have something like xterm or rxvt running- just the ability to resize the width of the window would be huge. I'd prefer not to run a whole X server on my machine- that's why I'm not just running cygwin's rxvt. I've also messed with the Konsole project from sourceforge, but found it unreliable- it kept losing touch with the backend. I'd prefer not to shell out cash for something that outa be built in, but earnest recommendations for powershell et al will be considered. I'm running Vista 32 and 64.

Thanks!

How do I control my media center remotely?

geoff. — Sat, 31 May 2008 09:59:27 -0800

How do I control a media center pc from a laptop? The catch: I want to make my terminal session run as if I was logged in at the console. This is to control a media center from afar. Right now I'm running Microsoft Vista Ultimate. I realize that I can add a patch to enable concurrent sessions, but that just starts another session. I want control the console session, so that the audio and video plays through my HDTV and my receivers. Right now I'm using a wireless mouse and keyboard, but it'd be so much easier if I could just use my laptop to terminal in.

I'm not wedded to Vista, and am looking at XBMC on OS X, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to do this. The end result is I want the video/audio to be selected from a terminal session and output to my DVI/optical out on the headless machine (or a web browser like a SlimServer setup ... in fact I loved the ability to select songs and albums from a web browser and have them output through my Roku and receiver).

FYI I found that media centers, as a whole, disappoint. It is much easier to navigate the file directory and play something in VLC. This is hard on the eyes when you're 10ft away.

Low cost terminal/pc?

edmz — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:24:34 -0800

Recommend me a low cost terminal/pc/laptop/whatever with an ethernet adapter and a way to access the web. I'm working on a project that sends work orders to different people. Most of our these people have a PC with internet access which they use to a webpage where they track their orders.

Now, we are about to add at least 50 more people to our system, none of which has a PC. And, since we must provide them with a way to access the order tracking software, we can't afford to buy PCs to each and everyone of them.

Each product order is basically text, averaging less than 1Kb of data. When someone receives an order they must confirm it. They also must be able to type a message back.

This means that the device that receives the orders must have a keyboard, a screen, an ethernet adapter and some way to access data (either a browser, a telnet client, wap browser).

One option is to deliver the orders via SMS messages, but it could become expensive (in my country sms are not cheap), its not reliable (a message could take 10 minutes to arrive, to late for our needs and replying to an order could take forever.

It doesn't have to be a PC or laptop. I'm looking for any kind of device that can help me achieve this task.

Ideally, each device must cost less than $200USD.

Coloring an OSX Terminal window based on an ssh connection?

neilkod — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:45:17 -0800

My career involves me using OSX Terminal ssh'd into other servers. Often, I have multiple ssh connections open, sometimes two or three to the same server. I can't bring myself to use tabs. Is there anything that can automatically be done to automatically color/title my terminal windows once I ssh into them? Even nicer would be a spotlight command to launch terminal and connect to a terminal. Then, the color/background image (and window title) would change based on my ssh connection, depending on server name/address, production vs qa vs dev, etc. We're talking about 10 diff. servers overall and often I have two or three terminals open to the same server.

Is this the reason I've been needing to finally delve into Applescript, or does a solution already exist?

I would consider installing QS if a solution exists. If it helps, I dont do a whole lot locally from the OSX terminal, its always ssh.

How to split a file by blank lines?

jacob — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:06:45 -0800

UnixFilter: How can I split a file by blank lines? I've got a large (~ 1 GB) logfile that I'd like to split into multiple files, one for each request. Each request is separated from the next by 3 blank lines.

I've tried using the csplit utility to perform this task, but I can't work out how to match multiple blank lines.

What happened to my dock (et al)??

Return Zero — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:13:45 -0800

I was recently trying to add a "Recents" stack to my dock in Mac OS 10.5.2 using Terminal. I entered a command, pressed enter, and then restarted the dock. From then on, I could not use the dock anymore, nor Dashboard, Spaces, Expose, or the application switcher. I also noticed that my motion sensors do not work anymore. Everything still works on other accounts on my computer, just not on my administrator account. Any ideas about how to fix this?

Please help me make my terminal work!

mebibyte — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:24:17 -0800

How can I get new tabs in Mac OS X Terminal.app to open with the same current working directory as the tab from which I opened the new one? I use Mac OS X and Linux. Many Linux terminal emulators I've used (gnome-terminal,xfce-terminal) have this great feature where, when I open a new tab, the current working directory is set to the working directory of the shell I opened the new tab from. This is great when I'm working with my webapps - I cd into my project directory, start the server on one tab, open a new one to use for tests, open a third to use for editing. When I'm working on my homework for school I can open up one tab as my editing tab, another to use an interactive Python shell, another I can use to run my homework, etc etc.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to do this with Terminal.app or iTerm. iTerm's sourceforge page shows an outstanding request for this feature. I would add it in myself but I don't have any Objective-C skills :( Are there any other terminal apps for OS X that would allow me to do something like this?

Are there any good terminals for OS X/X11 that don't have too much in the way of dependencies/bloat that support this feature? I don't normally use X11 on my Mac, but am willing to for this awesome, time-saving feature.

How can I set up a college fund for my possibly terminally ill friend's children?

mingshan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:11:36 -0800

I have a friend with a possibly terminal illness. I'm trying to figure out a way to set up a college fund, to which any of her friends/family could contribute, for her two young children. So far I've looked into ESAs (might not work due to the $2k annual limit) and 529s, but I've had trouble finding information specific to this type of situation -- which I have to imagine is not all that uncommon. What options should I be investigating? Should I talk to a financial advisor?

How do I get terminal services to keep a port connection?

KevinSkomsvold — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:49:45 -0800

How do I make a USB port map permanent with terminal services? Here's the situation:

I set up a USB CC reader on a local workstation. This workstation connects to a Point of Sale software package via TS which uses the card reader. I am able to configure the card reader just fine and it will work perfectly. As soon as the user logs out for the day and tries to use it the next morning, the USB card reader isn't recognized in the TS session. The cashier has to run the card reader utility again. I'm guessing its because TS only uses the port mapping on a per session basis. What is the best way to make this connection permanent? Or better, what would be the best way to set it up so that the user can log out and log back in without having to run the card reader config utility each time?

Thanks.