Historically, the command line interface provided a way to manipulate a computer over simple, text-based connections. In the modern era, in spite of the ability to transmit graphical user interfaces over the Internet, the command line remains a powerful tool for performing certain types of tasks.
As described previously in Before You Begin, most users interact with a command-line environment using the Terminal application, though you may also use a remote connection method such as secure shell (SSH). Each Terminal window or SSH connection provides access to the input and output of a shell process. A shell is a special command-line tool that is designed specifically to provide text-based interactive control over other command-line tools.
In addition to running individual tools, most shells provide some means of combining multiple tools into structured programs, called shell scripts (the subject of this book).
The software update tool does not update Mac App Store apps on any OS from 10.7 through 10.9.2 - only system software updates are available from the command line. The author is correct that you can't instal new updates and incorrect that other third party app updates will be included to update. – bmike ♦ Nov 28 '12 at 17:42. The Disk Utility interface is the same one you’ll see on your Mac OS X desktop, but run it from here and it’ll be able to repair problems with your system drive. Use fsck in Single-User Mode In some cases, even Safe Mode or Disk Utility in OS X Recovery won’t be enough to fix problems.
Different shells feature slightly different capabilities and scripting syntax. Although you can use any shell of your choice, the examples in this book assume that you are using the standard OS X shell. The standard shell is
bash if you are running OS X v10.3 or later and tcsh if you are running an earlier version of the operating system.
The following sections provide some basic information and tips about using the command-line interface more effectively; they are not intended as an exhaustive reference for using the shell environments.
Note: This appendix was originally part of Mac Technology Overview.
Basic Shell Concepts
Before you start working in any shell environment, there are some basic features of shell scripting that you should understand. Some of these features are specific to OS X, but most are common to all platforms that support shell scripting.
Running Your First Command-Line Tool
In general, you run command-line tools that OS X provides by typing the name of the tool. (The syntax for running tools that you’ve added is described later in this appendix.)
For example, if you run the
ls command, by default, it lists the files in your home directory. To run this command, type ls and press Return.
Most tools also can take a number of flags (sometimes called switches). For example, you can get a “long” file listing (with additional information about every file) by typing
ls -l and pressing Return. The -l flag tells the ls command to change its default behavior.
Similarly, most tools take arguments. For example, to show a long listing of the files on your OS X desktop, type
ls -l Desktop and press Return. In that command, the word Desktop is an argument that is the name of the folder that contains the contents of your OS X desktop.
In addition, some tools have flags that take flag-specific arguments in addition to the main arguments to the tool as a whole.
Specifying Files and Directories
Most commands in the shell operate on files and directories, the locations of which are identified by paths. The directory names that make up a path are separated by forward-slash characters. For example, the Terminal program is in the
Utilities folder within the Applications folder at the top level of your hard drive. Its path is /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app .
The shell (along with, for that matter, all other UNIX applications and tools) also has a notion of a current working directory. When you specify a filename or path that does not start with a slash, that path is assumed to be relative to this directory. For example, if you type
cat foo , the cat command prints the contents of the file foo in the current directory. You can change the current directory using the cd command.
Finally, the shell supports a number of directory names that have a special meaning.
Table A-1 lists some of the standard shortcuts used to represent specific directories in the system. Because they are based on context, these shortcuts eliminate the need to type full paths in many situations.
File and directory names traditionally include only letters, numbers, hyphens, the underscore character (
_ ), and often a period (. ) followed by a file extension that indicates the type of file (.txt , for example). Most other characters, including space characters, should be avoided because they have special meaning to the shell.
Although some OS X file systems permit the use of these other characters, including spaces, you must do one of the following:
For example, the path name
My Disk can be written as 'My Disk' , 'My Disk' , or My Disk .
Single quotes are safer than double quotes because the shell does not do any interpretation of the contents of a single-quoted string. However, double quotes are less likely to appear in a filename, making them slightly easier to use. When in doubt, use a backslash before the character in question, or two backslashes to represent a literal backslash.
For more detailed information, see Quoting Special Characters in Flow Control, Expansion, and Parsing.
Accessing Files on Additional Volumes
On a typical UNIX system, the storage provided by local disk drives is presented as a single tree of files descending from a single root directory. This differs from the way the Finder presents local disk drives, which is as one or more volumes, with each volume acting as the root of its own directory hierarchy. To satisfy both worlds, OS X includes a hidden directory,
Volumes , at the root of the local file system. This directory contains all of the volumes attached to the local computer.
Movavi photo editor for mac. To access the contents of other local (and many network) volumes, you prefix the volume-relative path with
/Volumes/ followed by the volume name. For example, to access the Applications directory on a volume named MacOSX , you would use the path /Volumes/MacOSX/Applications .
Note: To access files on the boot volume, you are not required to add volume information, since the root directory of the boot volume is
/ . Including the volume information still works, though, so if you are interacting with the shell from an application that is volume-aware, you may want to add it, if only to be consistent with the way you access other volumes. You must include the volume information for all volumes other than the boot volume.
Input And Output
Most tools take text input from the user and print text out to the user’s screen. They do so using three standard file descriptors, which are created by the shell and are inherited by the program automatically. These standard file descriptors are listed in Table A-2.
To learn more about working with these descriptors, including redirecting the output of one tool to the input of another, read Shell Input and Output.
Terminating Programs
To terminate the currently running program from the command line, press Control-C. This keyboard shortcut sends an abort (
ABRT ) signal to the currently running process. In most cases this causes the process to terminate, although some tools may install signal handlers to trap this signal and respond differently. (See Trapping Signals in Advanced Techniques for details.)
In addition, you can terminate most scripts and command-line tools by closing a Terminal window or SSH connection. This sends a hangup (
HUP ) signal to the shell, which it then passes on to the currently running program. If you want a program to continue running after you log out, you should run it using the nohup command, which catches that signal and does not pass it on to whatever command it invokes.
Frequently Used Commands
Shell scripting involves a mixture of built-in shell commands and standard programs that run in all shells. Although most shells offer the same basic set of commands, there are often variations in the syntax and behavior of those commands. In addition to the shell commands, OS X also provides a set of standard programs that run in all shells.
Table A-3 lists some commands that are commonly used interactively in the shell. Most of the items in this table are not specific to any given shell. For syntax and usage information for each command, see the corresponding man page. For a more in-depth list of commands and their accompanying documentation, see OS X Man Pages.
Environment Variables
Some programs require the use of environment variables for their execution. Environment variables are variables inherited by all programs executed in the shell’s context. The shell itself uses environment variables to store information such as the name of the current user, the name of the host computer, and the paths to any executable programs. You can also create environment variables and use them to control the behavior of your program without modifying the program itself. For example, you might use an environment variable to tell your program to print debug information to the console.
To set the value of an environment variable, you use the appropriate shell command to associate a variable name with a value. For example, to set the environment variable
MYFUNCTION to the value MyGetData in the global shell environment you would type the following command in a Terminal window:
When you launch an application from a shell, the application inherits much of its parent shell’s environment, including any exported environment variables. This form of inheritance can be a useful way to configure the application dynamically. For example, your application can check for the presence (or value) of an environment variable and change its behavior accordingly. Different shells support different semantics for exporting environment variables, so see the man page for your preferred shell for further information.
Child processes of a shell inherit a copy of the environment of that shell. Shells do not share their environments with one another. Thus, variables you set in one Terminal window are not set in other Terminal windows. Once you close a Terminal window, any variables you set in that window are gone.
If you want the value of a variable to persist between sessions and in all Terminal windows, you must either add it to a login script or add it to your environment property list. See Before You Begin for details.
Similarly, environment variables set by tools or subshells are lost when those tools or subshells exit.
Running User-Added Commands
As mentioned previously, you can run most tools by typing their name. This is because those tools are located in specific directories that the shell searches when you type the name of a command. The shell uses the
PATH environment variable to control where it searches for these tools. It contains a colon-delimited list of paths to search--/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin , for example.
If a tool is in any other directory, you must provide a path for the program to tell it where to find that tool. (For security reasons, when writing scripts, you should always specify a complete, absolute path.)
For security reasons, the current working directory is not part of the default search path (
PATH ), and should not be added to it. If it were, then another user on a multi-user system could trick you into running a command by adding a malicious tool with the same name as one you would typically run (such as the ls command) or a common misspelling thereof.
For this reason, if you need to run a tool in the current working directory, you must explicitly specify its path, either as an absolute path (starting from
/ ) or as a relative path starting with a directory name (which can be the . directory). For example, to run the MyCommandLineProgram tool in the current directory, you could type ./MyCommandLineProgram and press Return.
With the aforementioned security caveats in mind, you can add new parts (temporarily) to the value of the
PATH environment variable by doing the following:
If you want the additional path components to persist between sessions and in all Terminal windows, you must either add it to a login script or add it to your environment property list. See Before You Begin for details.
Running Applications
To launch an application, you can generally either:
Execute Commands And Run Tools In Terminal On Mac - Apple .
Note: As a general rule, if you launch a GUI application from a script, you should run that script only within Terminal or another GUI application. You cannot necessarily launch an GUI application when logged in remotely (using SSH, for example). In general, doing so is possible only if you are also logged in using the OS X GUI, and in some versions of OS X, it is disallowed entirely.
Learning About Other Commands
At the command-line level, most documentation comes in the form of man pages (short for manual). Man pages provide reference information for many shell commands, programs, and POSIX-level concepts. The manual page
manpages describes the organization of manual, and the format and syntax of individual man pages.
To access a man page, type the
man command followed by the name of the thing you want to look up. For example, to look up information about the bash shell, you would type man bash . The man pages are also included in the OS X Developer Library (OS X Man Pages).
You can also search the manual pages by keyword using the
apropos command.
Note: Not all commands and programs have man pages. For a list of available man pages, look in the
/usr/share/man directory or see OS X Man Pages in the OS X Developer Library.
Most shells have a command or man page that displays the list of commands that are built into the shell (builtins). Table A-4 lists the available shells in OS X along with the ways you can access the list of builtins for the shell.
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Technical Note TN2339
This document provides answers to frequently asked questions about command line tools.
What is the Command Line Tools Package?
The Command Line Tools Package is a small self-contained package available for download separately from Xcode and that allows you to do command line development in macOS. It consists of the macOS SDK and command-line tools such as Clang, which are installed in the
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools directory.
Downloading command-line tools is not available in Xcode for macOS 10.9. How can I install them on my machine?
In macOS 10.9 and later, the Downloads pane of Xcode Preferences does not support downloading command-line tools. Use any of the following methods to install command-line tools on your system:
Note: In macOS 10.9 and later, Software update notifies you when new versions of the command-line tools are available for update.
How can I uninstall the command-line tools?
I have multiple versions of Xcode installed on my machine. What version of Xcode do the command-line tools currently use?
To find out what version of Xcode is being used by your tools, run the following command in Terminal:
Listing 2 Printing the version of Xcode currently used by the command-line tools.
How do I select the default version of Xcode to use for my command-line tools?
To select a default Xcode for your command-line tools, run the following command in Terminal:
where <path/to/> is the path to the Xcode.app package you wish to use for development.
Listing 3 Setting the default Xcode version.
How do I build my projects from the command line?
xcodebuild is a command-line tool that allows you to perform build, query, analyze, test, and archive operations on your Xcode projects and workspaces from the command line. It operates on one or more targets contained in your project, or a scheme contained in your project or workspace. xcodebuild provides several options for performing these operations as seen its man page. xcodebuild saves the output of your commands in the locations defined in the Locations preferences pane of your Xcode application, by default.
See below for various xcodebuild usage. Be sure to navigate to the directory containing your project or workspace in Terminal before running any of the following commands.
My app has multiple build configurations. How do I set a default build configuration for xcodebuild?
In Xcode, the Configurations section of your project's Info pane provides a pop-up menu, which sets the default configuration to be used by xcodebuild when building a target. Use this pop-up menu to select a default build configuration for xcodebuild as seen in Figure 2.
How do I run unit tests from the command line?
xcodebuild provides several options for running unit tests.
To build and run unit tests from the command line, execute the following command in Terminal:
To build unit tests without running them from the command line, execute the following command in Terminal:
To run unit tests without building them from the command line, execute any of the following command in Terminal:
The test action requires specifying a scheme and a destination. See How do I implement the Build For Testing and Test Without Building features from the command line? for more information about build-for-testing and test-without-building actions.
The
-workspace option allows you to specify the name of your workspace. Use this option when your scheme is contained in an Xcode workspace.
The
-project option allows you to specify the name of your Xcode project. Use this option when your scheme is contained in an Xcode project. It is required when there are multiple Xcode projects in the same directory and optional, otherwise.
The
-destination option allows you to specify a destination for your unit tests. It takes an argument <destination-specifier> , which describes the device, simulator, or Mac to use as a destination. It consists of a set of comma-separated key=value pairs, which are dependent upon the the device, simulator, or Mac being used.
The
-only-testing and -skip-testing options, which are optional, allow you to run only a specific test and to skip a test, respectively. They take an argument <test-identifier> , which specifies the test to be executed or excluded. test-identifier 's format is as follows:
TestTarget , which is required, is the name of the test bundle. TestClass and TestMethod , which are both optional, respectively represent the name of the class and the name of the method to be tested.
Note: See Xcode Scheme and Run your app in Simulator for more information about scheme and destination, respectively.
The
-destination option also allows you to run the same unit test on multiple destinations. This is done by adding it multiple times to your xcodebuild test command as demonstrated in Listing 17.
Listing 17 Tests the iOS scheme in both the Simulator and on an iPod touch.
Note: xcodebuild runs your tests sequentially. For instance In Listing 17, xcodebuild will first test iOS in the Simulator before executing it on the iPod touch.
How do I implement the Build For Testing and Test Without Building features from the command line?
Note:
build-for-testing and test-without-building provide support for continuous integration systems.
What keys can I pass to the exportOptionsPlist flag?
To get all available keys for
-exportOptionsPlist , run the following command in Terminal:
Listing 22 Fetching all keys supported by -exportOptionsPlist.
See Figure 3 for a sample file that contains some options for the -exportOptionsPlist flag.
How do I archive and export my app for distribution?
To archive and export your app for distribution, run the following command in Terminal:
![]()
where
<xcarchivepath> specifies the archive or the path of the archive to be exported, <destinationpath> specifies where to save the exported product, and <path> is the path to the file with a list of options for the -exportOptionsPlist flag.
Listing 23 Exports the iOSApp archive to the Release location with the options saved in the OptionsPlist.plist.
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