Spotlight is great, but it has some mom-friendly rules that limit the results. Since I’m a power user, I typically want to search the entire computer and see all results. Therefore, I use the mdfind command to search OS X.

Just pop open Terminal and type:

mdfind "income tax"

This will search for all files with the metadata words “income tax.”

First, stop Apache. Apache listens on port 80. If it’s running, Vagrant won’t be able to bind a VM to listen on port 80.

Then, just add a forwarded port to your Vagrantfile:

config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 80

And boot up Vagrant as sudo:

sudo vagrant up

sudo lsof -n -i4TCP:$PORT | grep LISTEN

• Replace $PORT with the port you are looking for
• This only works with TCP ports.
• Prefixing with sudo will show proceses the current user does not own

How to start Apache:

sudo apachectl start

How to stop Apache:

sudo apachectl stop

How to restart Apache:

sudo apachectl restart

N.B. I am on OS X Mavericks. It ships with Apache 2.

When developing Javascript, you may wish to run code outside the browser. Luckily OS X comes with a world-class Javascript engine, which features a command-line interpreter.

Since it’s hidden deep inside a framework, create a symbolic link:

sudo ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaScriptCore.framework/Resources/jsc /usr/local/bin/js

Now, you can enter the interpreter by simply typing:

js

The interpreter can be quit by typing quit(); or ctrl+c.

To start MySQL on OS X:

mysql.server start

To stop MySQL on OS X:

mysql.server stop

Run this line in your Bash console:

env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "only this line should appear"

If you see this, your Bash is vulnerable to Heartbleed:

vulnerable
only this line should appear

If you see this, your Bash is secure from Heartbleed:

only this line should appear

I wanted to export my Safari Reading List on OS X, so I wrote some code to do it. I leveraged Ruby, but this methodology could be easily ported to other languages like Bash, Python, or Objective C.

When I decided to set up my Mac with PGP encrypted communications, I could not believe how hard it was – not just to set up the software, but to understand how to use PGP properly. There was no “PGP for Dummies” tutorial for OS X on the internet. So I decided to write one. This is my über simple, nerd-free tutorial for anyone on Mac. In it, I will:

1. Cover exactly how to install and configure PGP on OS X
2. Demonstrate how to use PGP in real life

In the last few years, ruby has taken the world by storm. With different projects dependent on different versions of Ruby, many Rails, Jekyll, and Sinatra programmers have installed RVM to manage their ruby versions in OS X. I am one of them.

While RVM is awesome, it can make some previously simple tasks difficult. One such example is creating a launchd daemon that invokes a ruby script. If your gems are installed with RVM, you will need to use RVM to write your daemon. That’s where it gets complicated.

This tutorial teaches you how to schedule a ruby task on OS X using launchd. You can schedule any ruby file to be run. It will be executed using the RVM ruby version of your choice.

Left unchecked, your OS X ~/Downloads folder can grow into a jungle. I solved that problem by setting up an Automator script to move everything from my ~/Downloads folder to my ~/Desktop. Once a day, I clean off my ~/Desktop. This is a quick tutorial how to set your Mac to do the same.

Use launchd. Do not use cron on OS X.

Source: the launchd man page.

If you run ls on a file or folder in OS X…

ls -la /dir/to/some_file_or_folder

You may see a permission entry like this:

-rwxr--r--@  1 john  admins   548 Oct 29 15:58 filename.plist

The at sign (@) means that the file has “extended attributes”. Extended attributes are basically some metadata that OS X and OS X apps can tack on to a file.

To view the extended attributes of a file, type:

xattr -l ./filename.ext

If you make a custom bash script in OS X, and you want everyone on the system to be able to access it, this is the directory where you should save it:

/usr/local/bin

To show hidden files in Finder, type this into the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

To set things back to normal, type this:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder