Right here I’m going to have some really neat tricks your MAC can do. Hopefully these will help someone or maybe even teach something. Anyway these tricks are one of reasons why I love my MAC so much.

Print Screen

Apple(command) + shift + 3 This combination takes a normal screen shot of the whole screen. After taking screen shot can be found from desktop with name screenshot[time], where [time] is the time screen shot was taken
Apple(command) + shift + 4 This is a lot cooler than the first one described here. With this you can take a screen shot of targeted segment of the screen, with out taking the first shot first to any painting application. You will receive a cursor, and you can select the target area by pressing mouse button down and selecting the correct area.
Some additional ticks>
Press space after the selection cursor appears and it will turn into a camera. This will allow you to take the screen shot from the window over which your camera hovers at the moment.
After choosing the targeted selection, before letting the mouse button up, you can also press space. This will allow you to move the selection, without changing its size.
  • Some of these tricks you at least should know and after reading this bit carefully you will know them for sure.
  • Take a Screen Shot of the whole screen – Command (AKA Apple key) + Shift + 3 – This is basically what Windows computers do when you press prt screen. You’ll get a nice shot of what the whole screen looks like. In my opinion not the best shot, but who knows what you’ll need
  • Take a Screen Shot of a selection – Command (AKA Apple key) + Shift + 4 – This gives you a nice selection and you can choose the area you want to get with this. This saves you a ton of time cause you don’t have to open a separate program to get selection you want to get.
    • After this, you can choose to alter your selection in few ways, this is also really handy compared to many other systems.
    • Space – Just press space once after your selection chooser appears and it’ll turn into a camera. With this camera you can select one window of wich the screen shot will be taken
    • Space – No this is not a joke. After you’ve chosen the section you’ll want to capture you can press space down and hold it there. In this case you can move the whole selection, without changing the size of the selection you’re going to take. Handy.

Top Ten Command Line Commands

These are just a top ten in my opinion. There’re dozens of other, which are in someones mind even more useful. These’re great commands and I hope that you’ll enjoy using them. Repeating that these are very basicks and aren’t the right choice to view for those who handle the base already.

Command: Description:
cat [file] This command takes a [file] and pastes it’s contents to command line. For example you could have a file called things.txt and have it’s contents to command line with command ‘cat things.txt’. This command will be used many times with piping, so you should remember it, even if you don’t find it useful at the moment.
man [command] This is a really useful command and everyone uses it from time to time. With this command you’ll find good manuals on what the [command] does. Really useful if you know command ls and want to know more of it, just write ‘man ls’.
pwd Gives you the directory where you’re. I’ve used this many times, if you have many commandline windows open, then you will surely love this command. You’ll be addicted to this one.
ls This gives you the contents of the file where you’re at the moment or if you prefer ls gives the list of contents. You will just love this command and when you learn to use -a with it, then there’s no turning back.
grep This is one of the most useful commands. You give it a string and it searches the locations where that string exist in the file. This might reach it\s full potential only after you learn piping. For example you could use it as such ‘cat things.txt | grep Candy’. This command would print out the lines that mention string Candy in file things.txt. | is the piping symbol.
wc This is the word count. You can for example make this statement ‘cat things.txt | wc -l’ and it would give you number of lines in the file things.txt. You’ll surely want to know more, so write ‘man wc’ in your command line. This will tell you for example what the three numbers are using just wc and lots of other interesting stuff.
| Yes, it’s just the symbol for piping and not a command at all. Why I wanted to bring this up here, is cause you can only get the true power of *NIX command line to your hands if you understand what piping means. When you pipe commands, you just literally execute them in order you give them. You’ll have to remember that with great power comes great responsibility. So piping is great as long as it’s done right. You could for example have ‘ls -la | grep -i gas | wc -l’. Figure out this command, and it’s a great start into understanding the universe.
cd This’s one of the most basic commands and at the same time one of the most important to understand. You might have tried this on your first computers, write ‘cd [folder]‘ and your position on command line has changed to the ./folder. Now you might think what’re cd .. and cd . then. They’re normal usage of this command and only ask that you know what .. and . stand for, as folders. Just cd will take you to the same destination as cd ~. Read man cd.
ping [address] This command sends packets to the address and watches if it’ll receive these back. You can end this process any time with hitting ctrl + c and it’ll tell you the results of this ping. I use ‘ping www.google.com’ a lot. Google is right now the strongest source in the world for something like this.
date This command just prints out the current date. You’d be shock’d on how many times I’ve had to use this command to know what day it is. You can also do something like have the calendar on the dashboard or just know the date. But this helps, trust me!

I’m going to give few commands here, that didn’t make it to TOP 10 for having too much contents there or that these commands are more specific and aren’t a for good use to everyone.

Command: Description:
cp [file1] [file2] This’s one of the most basic command line commands. It will copu contents of [file1] to [file2]. You can for example make a command ‘cp importantdoc.txt .importantdoc.txt’. This command will copy your important document to a hidden file and you’re safe to modify the original file then.
mv [location1] [location2] This command will just move the file specified in [location1] to [location2]. You could for example move ‘mv importantfile.txt ..’ this will just move the importantfile.txt one place back in tree. You don’t have to try this at root level. :)
pico [file] With this simple command, you can edit target file in the command line. You really should not do anything really big with this, cause it’s missing most of the good features like syntax high lites in most cases. Though this is a great tool to add few lines to your HTML page or just add something to a random .txt file.
sudo This command just gives you the right to do something as the superuser. If you’re using your system as a basic user, you don’t usually know the password for this. It will though be a very useful, if you’re running your own release of linux at your home computer. Very useful with MACs too.
ssh [user]@[server] With this simple command you can take a secure shell connection to a outer server. I use this all the time to get my own connection to IRC-server. If you’re at school this will most likely work. I used this as ‘ssh t4hiak00@students.oamk.fi’. After this it will ask you the password for the site.
scp [user]@[server]:[file_to_transfer] This command will transfer the chosen file to the users directory at the server. Just great for school and quicly getting those files out there. scp is also known as secure copy and it uses secure s in front of the command as most have already noticed.