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Use tmutil to take control of Time Machine in Mountain Lion
Time Machine works best when you use it as it's designed: You simply let it run in the background and do its thing, only bothering it when you have to go back and get an old version of a document out. But if you ever want to do anything a little crazy with Time Machine ("adopting" a backup history on a migrated machine, for instance) it can be a little cranky. For those situations, says researcher Simon Heimlicher, there's a cool little Terminal command called "tmutil." The command, which was introduced in OS X 10.7 Lion, allows you to reconnect your computer to older backups if you swap hard drives or upgrade your Mac. While Lion and Mountain Lion will give you the option to inherit old backups when you migrate your machine, it's nice to be able to do it manually if you need to. It also allows for a few other functions, like combining and comparing backups, manually restoring items and adding or removing exclusions directly. Our buddy Cory Bohon points out a few more undocumented commands for checking your backup status. It should be noted that the improper use of "tmutil" could very easily munge your backups beyond salvaging, so be cautious. If you use Time Machine quite a bit, especially in those crazy ways it's not always meant to be used, it sounds like "tmutil" is well worth learning about.
Open man pages from Xcode
Toxic Software's posted a useful little script if you spend any amount of time in Xcode-- because manopen is having trouble with Leopard, John punched up a shell/Applescript to open man pages directly from within Xcode's command line. It's tiny (and doesn't really do much-- just opens an Xcode Help menu item), but it seems useful-- straight from the command line, you can break out the man page within a GUI, and just keep right on coding.Because the script uses UI scripting, you've got to enable an option in Universal Access preferences, but then just toss the script in your PATH and you're good to go. I can't imagine it's hugely relevant for everyone out there (I haven't put anything together from the command line in Xcode in a while), but anyone building stuff there will probably appreciate it.And if viewing pretty man pages from the command line is your thing, Atomicbird Software came up with a script that breaks out man pages in PDF form. If you love working from the command line but love reading man pages in something a little easier to browse, today's your lucky day.
Monday man page: lsof
Happy hangover Monday everyone! To soothe those post-big-game blues, here's this week's man page -- lsof, the LiSt Open Files tool. If you're trying to figure out why a removable drive won't unmount or track down a stray outbound network connection, this is the tool for you. Note: If you want to stay out of the command line but still accomplish some of the same tasks, a reader suggests you check out Sloth. Written by Vic Abell of Purdue University (now retired), the power and flexibility of lsof has given it the distinction of reputedly having more command-line flags than any other tool: lsof [ -?abChlnNOPRstUvVX ] [ -A A ] [ -c c ] [ +c c ] [ +|-d d ] [ +|-D D ] [ +|-f [cfgGn] ] [ -F [f] ] [ -g [s] ] [ -i [i] ] [ -k k ] [ +|-L [l] ] [ +|-m m ] [ +|-M ] [ -o [o] ] [ -p s ] [ +|-r [t] ] [ -S [t] ] [ -T [t] ] [ -u s ] [ +|-w ] [ -x [fl] ] [ -z [z] ] [ -- ] [names] Yee-ikes. Let's get two quick tips taken care of before we move on to the details. First, you probably don't ever want to run lsof with no options specified, as that will generate a list of every open file on your machine (likely thousands of lines). Second, for a quick review of all those options, try lsof -h. More after the break...
Monday man page: dig, host & nslookup
For this week's Monday man page, it's a triple threat: dig, host, and nslookup. All three utilities are included with the BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) version 9 package, part of every Mac OS X 10.4 installation, and all three do pretty much the same task: translate hostnames to IP addresses and vice versa. In 10.3.9 and earlier, the Network Utility 'lookup' tab was a front-end for nslookup, with an option via checkbox to use dig instead; starting in 10.4 the checkbox is gone and the utility is dig-only. If you want a good introduction to how DNS works, the MacDevCenter has an excellent primer, and I can also heartily recommend DNS and BIND, possibly the most comprehensible book about a complicated subject that I've ever read. After the jump, we'll talk a bit more about how DNS lookup tools are useful, and why you might prefer one of this troika to the others.
