os x

Spotlight Indexing

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Shell commands to control Spotlight indexing on volumes.

  • To only turn off indexing on a volume:
    sudo mdutil -i off /Volume/drivename/
  • To Turn off indexing and remove indices on a volume:
    sudo mdutil -E -i off /Volumes/drivename/
  • To only turn on indexing on a volume:
    sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/drivename/
  • To turn on indexing and rebuild indices on a volume:
    sudo mdutil -E -i on /Volumes/drivename/
  • To only force rebuilding of indices on a volume:
    sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/drivename

Login Hooks

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How to execute scripts when a user logs into, or out of, an OS X workstation.

Apple tech note
Bombich.com article
Scripting Login Tasks in OS X

Create a hook:

sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /path/to/script

See what the login hook is set to:
sudo defaults read com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook

Snow Leopard Deployment Issues

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Collection of assorted issues that came up deploying some OS 10.6 "Snow Leopard" iMacs.

  • Adobe Acrobat Crashes on OS X With Network Account - an alternative way of achieving this solution, since we have OS X Server, was to use MCX to automatically redirect the folders for network users:
    Action - deleteAndCreateSymblink
    Destination Folder Path - /Users/Shared/9.0_x86/
    Folder Path: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat/9.0_x86

chflag

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OS X flags for further controlling what can be done with folders and files.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031017061722471

  • arch - "archived flag"
  • opaque - "opaque flag"
  • nodump - "nodump flag"
  • sappnd - "system append-only flag"
  • schg - "system immutable flag"
  • uappnd - "user append-only flag"
  • uchg - "user immutable flag"

Lock a file from being moved, renamed or deleted:

chflags uchg filename

Undo it with:
chflags nouchg filename

OS X Font Management

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Notes on handling fonts in OS X, particularly 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Font Management in OS X - lots of tips on managing fonts in various versions of OS X, and what to do about Apple's versions of Helvetica, etc.

How to Clear the Font Cache

Undoing Font Book - how to reset Font Book's cache.

ImageMagick for OS X

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Installing ImageMagick on OS X 10.3 (Panther) and OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Recommended Libraries

ImageMagick installation
To get the latest version of ImageMagick:

Capturing Web Pages

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Options for automating the capture of a screen shot of a web page.

Paparazzi!
Paparazzi! is an OS X application for capturing screenshots of web pages. It is AppleScriptable to automate the capture of a page:

tell application "Paparazzi!"
  capture "http://www.google.com/"
  repeat while busy
    delay 1
  end repeat
  save in POSIX file "/Users/foo/Desktop/google.png" as PNG with icon
end tell

webkit2png

PHP5 on Panther

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Special instructions for installing PHP5 on OS X 10.3

Handy programs for scripting on OS X

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  • MacOSX::File - A collection of Perl modules to manipulate files on MacOS X (set file/creator codes, copy files while preserving the resource fork,etc.)
    Installing on Panther resulted in a "gcc2" error when trying to install from CPAN. Manually still required a tweak even though the latest version has a patch for Panther:

    curl -O http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/D/DA/DANKOGAI/MacOSX-File-0.71.tar.gz
    tar zxvf MacOSX-File-0.71.tar.gz
    cd MacOSX-File-0.71
    perl Makefile.PL
    make CC=gcc3
    make test

Finding files (quickly) from OS X's command line

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Quickly locating files in *nix Shell scripts on OS X.

http://cocoacafe.wordpress.com/2007/06/17/fscatalogsearch/

http://codesnippets.joyent.com/tag/slocate

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