Shell Tutorials

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    Restart Mac From Command Line

    Restarting and shutting down a computer remotely is a frequent task for remote system administrators. As someone that writes many shell scripts, I also find myself automating system restarts. Let's look at a few ways to restart Mac systems from command line!Restart a Local MacTo...

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    How to Blur Faces in a Video from Command Line

    Privacy is always incredibly important, especially with visual media where you may not have the permission of individuals in the video. If you're filming something in public, it's likely you'll catch someone's face who simply doesn't want or need to be identified. This recently...

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    How to Get a Computer’s Hardware ID

    Cheating in online games is a huge issue these days -- just ask anyone playing PUBG. Cheaters aren't difficult for players to spot but vendors oftentimes don't do enough to punish these villains. Krafton recently announced they would start banning cheaters by hardware ID...

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    How to Get a Base64 Version of a File From Command Line

    A while back I wrote an article on how to Convert Image to Data URI with JavaScript. It's a neat trick developers can use for any number of reasons. Instead of abusing canvas, however, why not simply get the base64 data from...

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    How to Get Mac Battery Level from Command Line

    I'm a big fan of having as much information as I can get within the command line. I couldn't go without knowing which git branch I'm on, for example. Another important piece of information I like having is my current battery percentage.To get...

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    How to Open a Tor Brave Window from Command Line

    I love the Brave web browser for many reasons: ad blocking, Brave rewards, crypto integration, and even a Tor tab feature. I'll often use the Tor feature but wanted to know how I could automated opening Tor windows from command line.To open a Brave Tor...

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    How to Open an App from Anywhere on Mac Command Line

    Many engineers like myself live in the command line, and perform actions from command line that most others would click an icon for. I've always found opening apps from command line on Macs painful. You need to references the Applications directory, add .app to...

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    How to Create a Diff of Two Images

    When I was a child, I loved looking for Waldo in the "Where's Waldo?" book series. These days I'm a sucker for TMZ's "What's the Big Frigin Difference" images, where TMZ slightly changes an image and you have to spot the differences between the two.

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    Locate Empty Directories from Command Line

    As a software engineer that lives too much of his life on a computer, I like keeping my machine as clean as possible. I don't keep rogue downloaded files and removes apps when I don't need them. Part of keeping a clean, performant system...

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    Create a Thumbnail From a Video with ffmpeg

    Creating a thumbnail to represent a video is a frequent task when presenting media on a website. I previously created a shell script to create a preview video from a larger video, much like many adult sites provide. Let's view how we can...