Where is the cupsctl terminal executable on MacOSX? - macos

I've looked everywhere, and can't seem to find cupsctl anywhere. I assume it's a lot like echo or sh, it's just an executable with a PATH variable sat somewhere on the system. In order for me to call an NSTask from an Obj-C app I'm working on, I need to know where it is.

Use the UNIX find command to search your entire disk starting at the root
e.g. find / -name 'cupsctl'
Shouldn't actually take all that long assuming an average sized SSD. A couple of seconds on my Mac
$ sudo find / -name 'cupsctl' 2> /dev/null
/usr/sbin/cupsctl
or, as it's OS X, if you have spotlight indexes you could use mdfind
mdfind -name 'cupsctl'
which returns instantly with a few results, most of which are Safari history for this page :-)

Related

Find git repository on macOS

I would like to find the location of a Git repository I made on my mac. Is there a way to find, for exemple, albatrocity/git-version-control.markdown on macOS using the Terminal? I installed everything with default parameters. I guess it must be in the User directory but I don't find anything related to GitHub there.
When I find it, I would like to completely remove it to maker a "proper" install.
EDIT: sudo find / -name "parsing.py" -print
I used a file that I know the folder contained when Terminal showed me nothing with sudo find / -wholename "*albatrocity/git-version-control.markdown"
You can use find's -wholename option to find a file based on its name and folder:
find <directory> -wholename "*albatrocity/git-version-control.markdown"
Example, if you want to search in the /Users/ directory:
find /Users/ -wholename "*albatrocity/git-version-control.markdown"
If you have locate on mac, and a regularly running updatedb, locate might be much faster:
locate albatrocity | grep git-version-control.markdown
It uses a hashtable to fast access filenames, but can be out of date, if the database isn't updated regularly or the file is too young (typically less than one day old).
If this is without success, then I would go for a full search with find, but maybe restrict it to a possible, narrowed path.

How to monitor file changes on network mapped drives?

From what I see, network mapped drives appear as subfolders of the /Volumes folder.
What is the proper way to get file changes updates (delete/create/update) from this folder?
Would /dev/fsevents work for that?
How does Finder know about the changes?
You're correct, OS X mounts the network drives in /Volumes
The way to get file change updates is to use File System Events API. It is a C-based API where you would watch for all changes in specific directories (or even /).
You would create the stream with FSEventStreamCreate and starting it with FSEventStreamScheduleWithRunLoop
Be prepared to dig into the header-file as there is more documentation on it as in the Reference documentation
From what I can tell, Finder probably uses some internal API or the kernel queues which are more complex to setup than the higher-level API of FSEvents.h
There is a nice GUI to helping you see how the whole events come in. It's called fseventer by fernlightning (not yet Yosemite ready)
You can use fswatch, which I find easest to install via homebrew. And, yes it does use FSEvents. Then you just do:
fswatch /Volumes/MUSIC
where MUSIC is a Samba-based music server on my network.
Here is how it looks in action... first I show the mounted volumes (and that MUSIC is Samba based) in the top window, then I start fswatch in the bottom left window, then I make modifications in the filesystem in the top window and you can see them happen in the Finder and also see in the bottom left window that fswatch tracks all the events.
You can also use it to interact with another program whenever events are detected, like this (extracted from the fswatch manpage):
Probably the simplest way to pipe fswatch to another program in order to respond to an event is
using xargs:
$ fswatch -0 [opts] [paths] | xargs -0 -n 1 -I {} [command]
fswatch -0 will split records using the NUL character.
xargs -0 will split records using the NUL character. This is required to correctly match
impedance with fswatch.
xargs -n 1 will invoke command every record. If you want to do it every x records, then
use xargs -n x.
xargs -I {} will substitute occurrences of {} in command with the parsed argument. If
the command you are running does not need the event path name, just delete this option.
If you prefer using another replacement string, substitute {} with yours.

Moving files between users from shell in Mountain Lion

I am working on a group of Bash shell scripts and have one of the scripts check if an update is needed. If so, it needs to copy files from my computer to others. In Snow Leopard I can just do something like.
account=$(whoami)
cp "/Users/Sleepykrooks/Library/Services/Program" "/Users/$account/Library/Services/Program"
But with Mountain Lion, even though the full path still would look like this, using the same thing leads to an error of not finding the folder or file it's looking for. However it does work if you use something like.
cp "/Library/Services/Program" "/Library/Services/Program"
This is where I am unsure how to use my path to copy my updated files to another user's path.
Thank you for the help.
When you copy a folder in Unix, you usually need the -R flag. (See the cp manpage).
cp -R "/Users/Sleepykrooks/Library/Services/Program" "/Users/$account/Library/Services/Program"
Or, using the BASH shortcut of ~ for home directory:
cp -R ~Sleepykrooks/Library/Services/Program ~/Library/Services/Program
Normally, you should not be touching the /Library directory or the user's ~/Library directory on the Mac. And, you should never touch anything under /System unless you can stare into a TV camera and say in an absolutely serious tone "I'm a professional. Don't try this at home."

Bookmark Directories In Terminal

Looking for a solution to quickly navigate to long paths in a shell (particularly Max OS X Terminal.app).
Say my path is ~/This/Is/A/Really/Long/Path/That/I/Would/Rather/Not/Type/Frequently
Instead of cd ~/This/Is/A/....
I would like to be able to store favorites/bookmark directories so I could do "cd myPath"
Are there any binaries or tools available to do something like this?
I've found the packages 'Apparix' and 'Goto' which together make the stuff dreams are made of for us terminal junkies.
Naturally, I had trouble installing Apparix, but I figured it out in the end.
How To Install Apparix on Mac OS X:
Download the tarball from Apparix's homepage.
Unpack the tarball, cd to the unpacked folder.
Run this command ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local && make && make install.
Run man apparix, scroll down to the heading BASH-style functions, copy everything within that section (delimited with ---) and paste it into ~/.bash_profile.
That's it. You should now have Apparix up and running on OS X (further install info and usage is on Apparix's homepage).
Another solution is to use Bashmarks, which allows you to this
$ cd ~/This/Is/A/Really/Long/Path/That/I/Would/Rather/Not/Type/Frequently
$ s shortname # save current path as `shortname`
$ cd /
$ g shortname # cd to ~/This/Is/A/Really/Long/Path/That/I/Would/Rather/Not/Type/Frequently
You can use aliases (stick them in your ~/.bash_profile if you want them to always load)
alias cd_bmark1='cd ~/This/Is/A/Really/Long/Path/That/I/Would/Rather/Not/Type/Frequently'
Then use by just typing
cd_bmark1
into the console
I know you already found an answer that worked for you, but a couple of more lightweight suggestions that might help others looking for similar things
If your directories are relatively fixed, just long and far away from each other, you can use the CDPATH environment variable to add directories to the search path when typing the "cd" command. If the directory name you try to cd to isn't in the current directory, the other entries in your CD path will also be looked at (and it's also tab complete aware, at least in bash and zsh).
Switching to zsh rather than bash and using the excellent directory stacks abilities. With it, you can maintain a history of directories that you've visited, view the history with the "dh" alias, and easily switch to a directory by using quick shortcuts (ex: cd -3 to switch to the 3rd directory in your history stack).
Why not having a symlink ?
ln -s ~/This/Is/A/Really/Long/Path/That/I/Would/Rather/Not/Type/Frequently bmark
cd bmark
I use to.sh daily to create and navigate bookmarked paths in bash. It supports tag autocompletion and the ability to easily add/remove bookmarks.
https://github.com/Grafluxe/to.sh
Full disclosure, I wrote this tool :)

Unable to find Applications folder in Mac's terminal

I tried the following code unsuccessfully
find Applications | xargs -0 grep Applications
I also tried the following unsuccessfully
find Applications
Was it something instead like:
mdfind Applications | grep Applications
mdfind is a command line interface to Spotlight. Somehow, I doubt this is what you were looking for.
The following command will find the names of Mac apps you have installed somewhere under /Applications.
find /Applications -type d -name "*.app"
Your question as phrased is pretty hard to help with, since you are not stating what your overall intent is...
It's in /Applications.
Try
find /Applications

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