An easier way to kill processes

I’ve moved on from ps aux | grep -i processname; kill PID. The Mac (along with many other Unix-likes) has two handy utilities: pgrep and pkill. pgrep does a case-insensitive search for processes matching the expression you provide, and returns all matching PIDs, one per line. pkill does the same search, but just kills the …

Change DNS servers from the command line in Mac OS X

Changing DNS servers isn’t something most people need to do frequently. When you do need to change them up, though, it takes too many clicks in System Preferences. Use networksetup at the command line instead. For example, to change your DNS server to the OpenDNS servers, issue the following (if you’re using Ethernet): sudo networksetup …

Cleaning formatting from text on the Mac OS X pasteboard

There are a number of apps floating around that can strip rich text formatting from whatever you’ve copied to the pasteboard. I’m not sure why you’d need to buy an app for this. Here are two ways to get plain text. ⌘⌥⇧V – Paste and match style will give you plain text if you’re pasting …

Keep disk volumes from automounting in Mac OS X

I currently have two large external drives with a number of partitions I’m using to clean up and organize my accumulated files. I only need to see those volumes when I’m actually doing the organization, and I definitely don’t want to see them when I’m running the App Store, as they really slow things down …