macOS
How can I view configured networks in my terminal?
Let’s assume you have multiple networks set up under System Preferences > Networks.
You might have “Work” which has a bunch of proxy configuration specified and “Home” which just disabled proxy configuration.
If you left the former “Work” network selected, then went to a place that can’t access the proxy server, you wouldn’t be able to access the internet and vice versa.
To make automating this a little bit easier, there’s a command line tool called scselect
Here’s an example of what it looks like in action:
> scselect
Defined sets include: (* == current set)
* <guid> (Work)
<guid> (Home)
In this example, we can see the Work network is selected.
Now we wanted to change to the Home network, you could do so manually in System Preferences or you can run scselect with the name of the network you want to change to like so:
> scselect Home
CurrentSet updated to <guid> (Home)
> scselect
Defined sets include: (* == current set)
<guid> (Work)
* <guid> (Home)
As you can see, the Home network is now selected.
I only recently discovered this tool so I haven’t automated it yet but it’s probably feasible to have a file with your working hours and then if it’s within those hours, toggle on the Work network (and all of the proxy configuration that comes with it)
The reason you might want to use a schedule and not eg; WiFi name is that you might be working from home over a VPN for example.
How can I run a Homebrew application being blocked by Gatekeeper?
This issue is particularly annoying and I only just discovered it today for the first time.
Here’s an example of what it looks like
In order to install the application so that it bypasses Gatekeeper, you can rerun brew cask install like so:
> brew cask install --no-quarantine blah
> brew reinstall --no-quarantine blah
If you’d like to keep this flag enabled all the time, and honestly you might as well, you can also do the following:
> export HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS="--no-quarantine"
> brew cask install blah
How can I hide folders in my Home directory?
If you’ve ever seen those pesky default folders like Public and Movies, the good news is that you can get rid of them.
You can’t, or more specifically, you shouldn’t fully delete them as some applications may assume their existence but you can get close enough.
Let’s say we want to hide Public, you can hide it from Finder like so:
chflags hidden ~/Public
The next time you navigate to your Home directory using Finder, you’ll see that they’ve magically disappeared
If you want to hide multiple at once, you can provide a comma delimited list:
chflags hidden ~/{Downloads,Public}
If, for whatever reason, you wanted to block anyone or anything from accessing those folders as well, you could use chmod to do that:
chmod 000 ~/{Downloads,Public}
Personally, I don’t bother with this step but you might have a use for it.
The one issue with the above is that you’ll see those files appear in your Terminal and I don’t know about you but that basically makes this whole exercise pointless.
There are ways to do it but I haven’t looked into them myself.
How can I see my route table?
For those of us who are subject to using corporate VPNs, all sorts of wackiness can occur such as 127.0.0.1 being routed first to another country before trying to resolve locally.
You can see both IPv4 and IPv6 routing entries by running netstat -rn. Personally, I like to just show IPv4 addresses.
Here’s an example of my route table with WiFi (and ethernet) interfaces disabled:
> netstat -nr -f inet
Routing tables
Internet:
Destination Gateway Flags Netif Expire
127 127.0.0.1 UCS lo0
127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 UH lo0
111.0.0 link#1 UmCS lo0
I’ve changed the last entry since I don’t actually know if it’s an internet work address.
How can I see what applications are making my shell commands slow?
Recently I had noticed that some shell commands on my laptop were executing surprisingly slow.
Like most things in the tech world, it was due to a piece of jamf software locking up anything that was being read.
I managed to validate this assumption using the command fs_usage which requires sudo. Here’s an example of it in action.
> sudo fs_usage | grep zshrc
Password:
16:19:22 open /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/zshrc.md 0.000021 lugh
16:19:22 open /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000137 lugh
16:19:22 WrData[A] /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000324 W lugh
16:19:22 lstat64 /System/Volumes/Data/Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000015 fseventsd
16:19:22 lstat64 dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000005 perl5.28
16:19:22 lstat64 .zshrc 0.000007 perl5.28
16:19:22 lstat64 .zshrc 0.000004 perl5.28
16:19:22 readlink .zshrc 0.000004 perl5.28
16:19:22 stat64 dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc/.stow 0.000002 perl5.28
16:19:22 stat64 dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc/.nonstow 0.000001 perl5.28
16:19:22 stat64 dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000004 perl5.28
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000005 Finder
16:19:22 getattrlist /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000014 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000005 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/zshrc.md 0.000005 Finder
16:19:22 getattrlist /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/zshrc.md 0.000012 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/.zshrc 0.000005 Finder
16:19:22 getattrlist /Users/marcus/.zshrc 0.000015 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/zshrc.md 0.000005 Finder
16:19:22 getattrlist /Users/marcus/zshrc.md 0.000014 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/zshrc.md 0.000003 Finder
16:19:22 getxattr dotfiles/zsh/zshrc.md 0.000014 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/zshrc.md 0.000004 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/zshrc.md 0.000003 Finder
16:19:23 lstat64 /System/Volumes/Data/Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000005 fseventsd
Now this output doesn’t actually come from my work computer so you won’t see the mentioned JamfAgent but we can walk through this anyway.
First is lugh, a custom and possibly temporary literate markdown tool I use on my dotfiles. Next is perl, in the form of GNU Stow followed by macOS Finder doing some things. This gives a really nice breakdown of what is going on.
You can even use it to better understand applications, like if you run git status and see all the files that were touched within the .git folder.
I actually spotted that Yet Another Daemon was touching some of my .git files on my work laptop too. Shoo!
How can I try out x-callback-url commands?
There is a CLI tool called xcall which seems to be the only way I’ve seen to actually interact with x-callback-url outside of other applications.
It’s a bit wonky in that you have to drag xcall.app to your Applications folder and then either add that to your path or reference the cli tool inside directly.
Here’s an example of it in use:
> /Applications/xcall.app/Contents/MacOS/xcall -url "things:///version" -activateApp NO
{
"x-things-client-version" : "31310506",
"x-things-scheme-version" : "2"
}
Annoyingly, this will activate the application in question, if it isn’t already open, but that is the nature of x-callback-url after all.
It will take the foreground view upon opening but further invocations won’t trigger it, assuming you use -activateApp NO. If you want it to appear, such as when triggering a search, you can use -activateApp YES instead.