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macOS Apps

Articles about OS X applications.

How to burn an ISO file to a USB stick

I wanted to install Linux on a hard drive in Frankenmac, as Clover is a multi-boot utility—it lets you choose from any OS it sees during power up. (I'll add Windows, too, eventually.) To do this, you need to get Linux onto a USB stick. I've done this in the past, and my vague recollection of the process was download the ISO, convert to an image file, write image file to USB stick. However, as it'd been a few years, I went searching for references to make sure I had all the commands correct.

I found a lot of pages with a general summary of the process, and few with the specific steps. I tried one of those, but my USB stick didn't work. The other specific pages contained the same basic process, so I was stuck. Until I found this page, which contained a critical step I was missing: Formatting the USB stick before copying the image file.

For future reference, here's the precise process to follow if you want to burn an ISO file onto a USB stick…

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How to install ruby gems in Terminal

In yesterday's tip, See sensor stats in Terminal, I implied that installation of the iStats ruby gem was a simple one-line command. As a commenter pointed out, that's only true if you already have the prerequisites installed. The prerequisites in this case are the Xcode command line tools. Thankfully, you can install those without installing the full 5GB Xcode development environment.

(Rather than starting from scratch, I'm just going to borrow this bit from my detailed instructions for installing the transcode-video tools, because the Xcode command line tools are required there, too.)

Here's how to install the command line tools. Open Terminal, paste the following line, and press Return:

xcode-select --install

When you hit Return, you'll see a single line in response to your command:

$ xcode-select --install
xcode-select: note: install requested for command line developer tools

At this point, macOS will pop up a dialog, which is somewhat surprising as you're working in the decidedly non-GUI Terminal:

Do not click Get Xcode, unless you want to wait while 5GB of data downloads and installs on your Mac. Instead, click the Install button, which will display an onscreen license agreement. Click Agree, then let the install finish—it'll only take a couple of minutes.

If you're curious as to what just happened, the installer created a folder structure in the top-level Library folder (/Library > Developer > CommandLineTools), and installed a slew of programs in the usr folder within the CommandLineTools folder.

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See sensor stats in Terminal

Someone—perhaps it was Kirk—pointed me at this nifty Ruby gem to read and display your Mac's sensors in Terminal: iStats -- not to be confused with iStat Menus, a GUI tool that does similar things.

Installation is sinmple, via sudo gem install iStats. After a few minutes, iStats will be ready to use. In its simplest form, call istats by itself with no parameters. Normally I'd list the Terminal output here, but istats (by default, can be disabled) presents informatiomn with neat little inline bar graphs, so here's a screenshot:

This tool is especially useful on a laptop, as it provides an easy-to-read battery summary.

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Create Time Machine-like backups via rsync

Taking a break from the recent Frankenmac posts, here's a little trick for creating "Time Machine like" backups of anything you'd care to back up1I don't know how well this might work for Mac files, as opposed to Unix files. But Mac files can be saved to the real Time Machine.. In my case, it's the HTML files off of my web sites, both personal and work. I used to simply back these up, but then realized it'd be better to have versions rather than totally overwriting the backup each day (which is what I had been doing).

Once you've got it set up and working, you'll have a folder structure similar to the one at right, with one folder for each backup, and a "current" link that takes you to the newest backup.

I get zero credit for this one; my buddy James explained that he'd been using this method for a year without any troubles, and pointed me to this great guide2The original site that hosted this script is gone; I've linked to a copy I found on archive.org. Original URL:
https://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_time_machine.html that explains the process.

I used that guide and added the following to my backup script to create my own customized Time Machine for the files from here, robservatory.com:

/usr/local/bin/rsync -aP \
  --link-dest=/path/to/quasi/TM_backup/current user@host:/path/to/files/on/server/ \
  --exclude "errors.csv" \
  --delete --delete-excluded \
  /path/to/quasi/TM_backup/back-$newtime
rm -f /path/to/quasi/TM_backup/current
ln -s /path/to/quasi/TM_backup/back-$newtime /path/to/quasi/TM_backup/current

And that's all there is to it. Note that you may need a newer version of rsync than what comes with macOS now (2.6.9)—I use version 3.1.2 from Homebrew, so I can't say for sure that this script works with the stock version.

I've only been using this for a couple weeks, but it's working well for me so far.



Adjusting for the oddities of ctime

In the shell script I use to back up my web sites (I really should update that, they're much different now), I include a line that trims the backup folder of older compressed backups of the actual WordPress databases. That line used to look like this:

find path/to/sqlfiles/backups -ctime +5 -delete

I thought this should delete all backups in that folder that are at least five days old, via the ctime +5 bit.1Footnote: I know now I should have been using mtime, though it would have had the same issue I had with ctime. But it turns out I thought wrong. The above will delete all files that are at least six days old. Why? I don't know why it works this way, but it's mostly explained in the man page for find (my emphasis added):

-ctime n[smhdw]

       If no units are specified, this primary evaluates to true if the difference between the time of last change of file status information and the time find was started, rounded up to the next full 24-hour period, is n 24-hour periods.

       If units are specified, this primary evaluates to true if the difference between the time of last change of file status information and the time find was started is exactly n units. Please refer to the -atime primary description for information on supported time units.

To make find do what I wanted it to do, I just needed to change +5 to +5d. Simple enough…but while figuring this out, I stumbled across this page, which has an alternative solution with more flexibility:

find path/to/sqlfiles/backups -mmin +$((60*24*5)) -delete

The mmin parameter is much more precise than ctime:

-mmin n

       True if the difference between the file last modification time and the time find was started, rounded up to the next full minute, is n minutes.

By using mmin, I can be really precise. As shown, 60*24*5 gets me the same five-day interval as ctime +5d. (And yes, I could have used 7200 instead of 60*24*5, but I find it clearer to leave it in its expanded form.)

But I could instead delete backups that were older than 3.25 days (60*24*3.25 or 5040), or for any other arbitrary time period. I like the flexibility this offers over ctime, so I've switched my script over to this form.



Cancel shell script on remote connect failure

I use a shell script to back up this site (and a variant of the same script to back up the Many Tricks site). I've been using these scripts for over a decade (wow), and though they've evolved, they're still fundamentally the same. (I did switch from cron to launchd for launching them, however.)

While the script typically runs very nicely, I recently noticed that my last backup was from a few weeks ago—uh oh. It didn't take long to figure out what had gone wrong: My ISP changed the hostname of the machine my site runs on, and my script uses ssh, scp and rsync, which connect via the hostname. Unfortunately, the failure mode is silence, because the script runs via a scheduled task. The only way I knew it failed was when I went to check the backup folder. Obviously, something more automatic than that would be desirable.

After much web searching, I couldn't find anything that seeemed like it'd do what I want: An email (and onscreen alert) if my backup failed. I found lots of Unix solutions to send mail using sendmail, but I didn't really want to enable that on my Mac. So I futzed around and built a simple checker that will mail me when it can't reach my web host.

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How to find modified preference values

My recent tip about using Keyboard Maestro to toggle the visiblity of hidden items in Finder (which turned out to be irrelevant for Sierra users; just hold ⌘⌥.) works by checking a hidden macOS preferences setting. In this case, I checked for the existence of the AppleShowAllFiles key, which let me toggle the visiblity of invisible files based on the result of the check.

Controlling a macro—or a shell script or AppleScript—by checking (visible or hidden) preference values can be very useful. But how do you find out the name of the preference you need to check, and in which domain (preferences file) you'll find it? Hidden prefs are actually easiiest, because the command you use to write them tells you both the preference name and its location. For the hidden files in Finder tip, for instance, the command is this:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

So to check that in a script, I just need to save the results of defaults read com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles into a variable, and I can then take action based on the variable's value. But what about a normal pref, in an application (or in System Preferences)? Say you wanted to check whether Apple's Pages app was set to show its rulers in inches or centimeters…

Why would you want to know this setting? I don't know, I was just trying to come up with an example. Just go with it…

How do you find out the key name associated with that particular preference, and what file it's stored in? I use a couple of different methods.

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Quickly toggle visibility of invisible files in Finder

Update: If you're running macOS Sierra, ignore the rest of this tip because it's irrelevant! I had no idea Shift-Command-Period would show/hide hidden files directly in Finder in macOS Sierra. Thanks to NaOH for the great tip via the comments!

Basically, if you want to show invisible files in Finder in Sierra, pressing ⇧⌘-Period will toggle them between hidden and visible. Nice! If you're on an earlier version of macOS/OS X, however, you may find the macro version useful for easily showing and hiding hidden files in Finder.

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Install a cloud driver server of your very own

For many years, Peter and I have managed our shared Many Tricks files via Dropbox. To support Dropbox, we purchased an upgraded plan for $99 a year, which came with 1TB of space. We then used the same login to share the Dropbox folder. We didn't need anywhere near 1TB (we have about 4GB of shared files), but felt it was right to support Dropbox.

While this worked well, and we had no issue paying for it, we had a few concerns—about space, third-party involvement, and something possibly unique to my usage scenario. You can read the details in the remainder of this post, but to make a long story short, I went looking for a replacement. And I found one in Nextcloud. Nextcloud has a commercial product, but it's open source, so you can also install it on your own server, and via many hosting companies that have it preinstalled.

I was able to install it easily with our hosting provider; I had the basic install up and running in under 30 minutes. There are also native clients for Mac, as well as Windows, iOS, and Android. The Finder view with the Mac ap installed (it's an official Finder extension) is very similar to Dropbox or OneDrive or any other cloud client with a Mac app:

For us, Nextcloud has every feature we need for sharing our Many Tricks' files; read on for more detail on why we moved, install and admin, the Mac client, and some closing comments.

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Color and ‘human readable’ file sizes in Terminal

These are two very old tips, but I'd forgotten about them until recently, when I sent someone a screenshot and they said "Hey, how'd you do that?"

Do what, exactly? This…

The most-obvious thing in that shot is the colored filenames. But notice, too, the file sizes are in a human-readable form. Both of these changes are pretty simple, though you could spend hours playing with colors.

Human-readable output

To get human readable output—not just from ls but also in du, which shows disk space usage—just include an h with the ls command: ls -alh. Instead of raw bytes, the values are converted and marked with trailing B, K, M, etc.

Because I never use ls in its short form, I actually added a line to my .profile (which loads whenever you open a Terminal session) to make this automatic:

alias ls='ls -alh'

You could do the same thing with du, but I rarely use that command, so I didn't bother.

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