OS X Command Line Utilities

#1

Post by AlexeyBrin » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 12:38 PM UTC

OS X Command Line Utilities
mitchchn.me

Re: OS X Command Line Utilities

#2

Post by wanderfowl » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 1:33 PM UTC

I have fond memories of discovering my college roommate's open SSH connection, and using "say" to great effect.

Re: OS X Command Line Utilities

#3

Post by reubenmorais » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 1:34 PM UTC

And if you'd like to use some of those utilities on GUI apps, don't forget the utility to bind them all: Automator.app. It'll let you interact with terminal and GUI apps in all sorts of interesting ways. For example, you could create a global keyboard shortcut to upload the selected text to a pastebin.

Re: OS X Command Line Utilities

#4

Post by reuven » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 1:42 PM UTC

This article was nice, but it indicated that you need to change the system preferences in order to change the voice. It turns out that you can pass the -v flag to use a different voice, or "-v ?" to get a list of names.

So you can do

    say -v Samantha Help, I'm trapped in this castle!

or

    say -v Princess Help, I'm trapped in this castle!

But wait, it gets even better: The Mac comes with a number of voices for other languages, such as French, Hebrew, Chinese, and Arabic. And it turns out that the voices will work in English as well, using that country's accent. I just tried it with a few different languages, and was amazed by how well this worked, within reason:

    say -v Sin-ji  "Hello, I am Chinese.  What do you want to eat?"
    say -v Thomas  "Hello, I am French.  What do you want to eat?"
    say -v Carmit  "Hello, I am  Israeli.  What do you want to eat?"

And yes, I should get back to work...

Re: OS X Command Line Utilities

#5

Post by FilterSweep » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 1:45 PM UTC

#6 is the likes of what got us detentions in middle school

Re: OS X Command Line Utilities

#6

Post by scrollaway » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 1:46 PM UTC

What's with all the buzzfeed-level headlines making HN frontpage the past few days?

Not to say this isn't a useful list (for OSX users that is), but I can't possibly be the only one weirded out by this.

Re: OS X Command Line Utilities

#7

Post by Shengbo » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 1:51 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #6

What's with all the buzzfeed-level headlines making HN frontpage the past few days? Not to say this isn't a useful list (for OSX users that is), but I can't possibly be the only one weirded out by this.

Number 3 will BLOW YOUR MIND!

Re: OS X Command Line Utilities

#8

Post by pavel_lishin » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 1:51 PM UTC

reuven wrote: post #4

This article was nice, but it indicated that you need to change the system preferences in order to change the voice. It turns out that you can pass the -v flag to use a different voice, or "-v ?" to get a list of names. So you can do say -v Samantha Help, I'm trapped in this castle! or say -v Princess Help, I'm trapped in this castle! But wait, it gets even better: The Mac comes with a number of voices for other lang…

This is great, and the voices apparently only know how to speak English, and their own language!

That is, typing

    say -v Milena "Здравствуйте, меня зовут Milena.

Actually says, "Zdravstvuyte...", while typing

    say -v Bruce "Здравствуйте, меня зовут Milena.

Results in "Cyrillic capital letter 'Z'. Cyrillic small leter 'd'.", etc.

Re: OS X Command Line Utilities

#9

Post by raldi » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 1:55 PM UTC

Paging mods for headline change. I suggest, "OS X Command Line Utilities"

Re: OS X Command Line Utilities

#10

Post by Alex3917 » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 2:06 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #6

What's with all the buzzfeed-level headlines making HN frontpage the past few days? Not to say this isn't a useful list (for OSX users that is), but I can't possibly be the only one weirded out by this.

The actual post is fantastic though. There are a million posts that give a one sentence description of the common unix utilities, but very few that actually give examples of when they are the most useful.