Helpful utilities, and what they do!

[Phil St. Romain]

I'll start this one off by pointing out two great freeware apps I downloaded from versiontracker.com today:

Swap Cop moved my swap file to another partition using gui point-and-click process. I'd been intimidated by Terminal hacks to do this, but recommend Swap Cop. The speed boost is unmistakable.

Monolingual removed all the non-English language files; I recouped at least 300 MB space.

-------------

Share your favorite apps of this kind on this thread.

[Craig R. Arko]

Another one I was referred (via MacWindows.com) to is <an SMB network browser> (http://shukwit.com/main.php), so you don't have to memorize all those server/sharename combos anymore. So far it's worked fine on my network.

[hschickel]

Phil,

I've been playing around a bit with this utility. It uses the fstab method of moving the swap file. While this method can be reliable on a system with only 1 partitioned drive it can be very unreliable on a system with multiple drives due to the way OSX's autodiskmount system works.

Use this utility with caution.

Hugh

[jmb]

Phil,

How much physical RAM do you have?

jmb

[Phil St. Romain]

Hugh, when you say one partitioned drive, do you mean one physical hard drive with partitions, or more than one hard drive? I have only one hard drive, with 3 partitions, and stuck the Swap File on my 9.1 partition. No problems so far. If my hard drive had no partitions, Swap Cop would have had no alternatives for moving it.

jmb, I have 640 RAM on my Pismo, and 320 on my iMac.

[hschickel]

One physical drive with partitions seems to be ok. The mount point is always the same.

If you have multiple physical drives (ie CDs, firewire drives, scsi drives, etc.) the mount point can change due to environmental factors. Unlike with most *nixes - its not guaranteed. The fstab file assumes that it will get the same mount point every time but this cannot be assumed under OSX. This is probably why there is no fstab file in OSX natively.

See this thread (http://forums.osxhints.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=722) or this thread (http://www.macfixitforums.com/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum38&Number=218990&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=7&part=all&vc=1) for more.

Hugh

[Phil St. Romain]

Thanks, Hugh! Seems I'm OK with one drive and multiple partitions. The caution you raise might be in the Readme file that came with Swap Cop (no I didn't read it :rolleyes: ); if not, it should be.

[Thundarr]

One of my favorite utilities is InfoDog from http://www.pidog.com . It allows you to use shift-command-I to get more options about your selection than just command-I, such as letting you set creator and type, change file privileges and owner/group information, drag file path information from InfoDog to any application, and is an integrated file browser. Definitely increases the efficiency of making such changes by being readily available in the background. Give it a try.

[Thundarr]

Another favorite utility is OmniDiskSweeper, from OmniGroup, the makers of OmniWeb (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/). This utility scans your hard drive and lists files by their size. It lets you find big files relatively easily and delete the ones that are sucking up you hard disk space. I use it to see if I have been accumulating very large folders or files that might best be transferred to an external hard drive or burned onto a disk. With omnidisksweeper, it is a snap.

[DSHwrd]

Hey Phil,

Cany you point me in the right direction for "Multilingual"? I searched versiontracker and couldn't find it. If the languages are REALLY taking up about 300MB of space, I want them gone. :)

Thanks,
- Daniel H.

[Phil St. Romain]

Oops! That's Monolingual (http://versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=13031&db=mac)

I'll make the correction in the opening post.

[thatch]

Here's another way to de-localize your drive from Mike Bombich called DeLocalizer:

http://www.bombich.com/mactips/index.html

And there's always the good old command line way of doing it:

find / \! -name "English.lproj" -name "*.lproj" -type d -exec rm -r -- {} \;

There are a lot of other good utilities on Mike's site that are very useful, like Foresight, which can be used to back up individual files or directories saving all the attributes and permissions so that you can move it where ever you want to and restore it there. I use it to backup my Home, Applications and Library directories to CD-RW.

Also, check out Carbon Copy Cloner for cloning local drives keeping all the attributes, permissions, hard and symbolic links together and readily bootable for use on the target partition.

[saint.duo]

the command line method one post above this one is not safe. If I read it right, it will remove any file ending in ".lproj" that doesn't start with "English". This will result in some non language files being removed. The ones that come to mind are epson.lproj (i think, I know they are epson things).

There is a better command line script at the macosxhints site to do this.

[mervTormel]

good catch, saint.duo, there are, indeed, some files that script will vaporize that you hadn't oughta allow it to...

% sudo find / \! -name "English.lproj" -name "*.lproj" -type d
Password:
/Applications/Utilities/Applet Launcher.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj
/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj
/System/Library/CoreServices/Jar Launcher.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/PrintCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/en_AU.lproj
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/PrintCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/en_GB.lproj
/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/Print.framework/Versions/A/Resources/en_AU.lproj
/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/Print.framework/Versions/A/Resources/en_GB.lproj
/System/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj

even tho those files above are prolly nukable, they fall outside the expectations of the intentions of the command, so other files could list here.

what have we learned?

if you're handed a script, examine it and run the 'non-purposeful' portion before unleashing it to do it's dirty business, so you know what to expect.

[thatch]

My apologies for the incorrect command line. The improved version is no longer just a command line but rather an entire shell script and I was looking at a snippet of these things while I was posting. My bad.

Here is the correct shell script. It has to be made executable after saving it into your favorite text editor:

#!/bin/tcsh

sync
df
date
foreach language ( French Dutch Spanish Italian Swedish Portuguese German )
find / -name $language.lproj -type d -exec rm -r -- {} \; -prune
end
date
df
sync

....

But the real point to my original post was all the other tweaks mentioned there which are not dealing with the command line at all. So, please let's not overlook the good stuff.

[seb2]

if you want some other "more exotic" lprojs, have a look at omniweb's resources.

it has fancy stuff like zh_tw, (which afaik, is taiwanese chinese), da (danish) and others in it.

this might be a good starting point.

[meancode]

hey all,

my favorites for OS X are as follows:

Super Get Info (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=11311&db=mac) , its free for 14 days, and well worth the $$$

Window Shade X (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=12243&db=mac), bring back window shade so not all your windows go into the dock, i hate that.

Fruit Menu (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=12974&db=mac), bring back the good old apple menu, very custimizable.

Quitling (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=11514&db=mac), its something like ASM, but with a kick. it allows you to do things such as quit, force quit, relanch, and switch to an all like ASM does.

Process Wizard (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=13366&db=mac), this is a nice gui for 'nice' and 'renice' to change the priority of an app.

Share Points (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=12512&db=mac), share (or unshare) any folder on the hd, brings back the ability to share like OS 9 has.

Tinker Tool (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=11967&db=mac), this tool does a lot, but my favorite feature is scroll arrows together at both ends.

A Better Finder Rename (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=11366&db=mac), this is a killer util to rename things, with tons of find/replace options, well worth the $$$, too bad the OS X version does not create droplets like the OS 9 version does.

Little Dutch Moose (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=13412&db=mac) , this is well worh the $$$ for people running a web server on OSX client or OSXS, it cleans the log files of all the worms/virus hits to your site, so you can actually see what is getting hit, other than requests for win32, etc.

Mac Reporter (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=12024&db=mac) , grab all the headlines (not just mac headlines) you want.

unlockAll (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=12141&db=mac) , great tool to lock/unlock mass amounts of files with.

guess thats a grociery list of stuff i like for OS X. i actually own all that stuff wich is shareware. and i use it too.

[Craig R. Arko]

The latest version of SNAX (1.2.5) is out, and it now supports labels in list view, along with many other enhancements.

[mervTormel]

...for the Faustian

"OmniDictionary is a Mac OS X client for network dictionary servers. It's pretty straightforward - type a word into the entry field, hit return, and the definition is displayed. If the dictionary server supports multiple dictionaries, you can select your desired dictionary from the dictionary popup to limit queries to that specific dictionary, or you can query all the dictionaries. OmniDictionary also provides a "Define in OmniDictionary" Service, so you can select words in your other applications and hit Command-= to see the definition."

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidictionary/


"Aiksaurus is an English-language thesaurus that is suitable for integration with word processors, email composers, and other authoring software."

http://www.aiksaurus.com/

OSX port...

http://www.alinameridon.com/AbiWord


and some handy shell word lookup commands:

tcsh:

% alias fword 'grep -i \!* /usr/share/dict/web2'


bash (function so you can parse args) :

$ fword () { fgrep -i "$*" /usr/share/dict/web2 | less ; }

% fword dangle
adangle
bedangled
dangle
dangleberry
danglement
dangler
dingledangle
fandangle
overdangle

[Titanium Man]

Hi everyone. MT, that last word lookup command of yours in bash is intriguing. I've been trying to figure out how to do this:

alias man 'man \!* | less'

in bash, so I adopted what you did, but couldn't get it to work. Can you (or anyone else) tell me how that might be done? Thanks.

TiMan

[mervTormel]

the \!* mechanism is a csh-ism

bash don't allow the \!* mechanism in aliases, so use functions to get arg parsing and all the lovely constucts that functions allow.


man looks at your environmental variable PAGER to get the paging viewer to use.

e.g., in bash,

export PAGER=less # instead of PAGER=more

export LESS='-i -M -P%t?f%f :stdin .?pb%pb\%:?lbLine %lb:?bbByte %bb:-...'


now, in bash, man will use less for the display pager, and the LESS env variable will feed less it's behavior. so there's no need for a 'man' alias or function.

see man less for all it's lovely wonkiness.

[Titanium Man]

MT to the rescue! I had no idea about the PAGER business. Man works as I had wanted it to now. Too bad about the \!* being a csh-ism though. Thanks!

[sao]

Some of my favorites...

Pacifist 1.0b4.1.
<<Pacifist is a small program that attempts to do in Mac OS X what TomeViewer did in Mac OS 9 - it opens up .pkg installer packages and lets you install individual files out of them. This is useful if you need to install just one file out of a package instead of the entire package (for example, if you deleted Sherlock and need to reinstall it, but not the whole operating system),>>

http://homepage.mac.com/csrstka/

MacJanitor 1.0
<<MacJanitor is provided as freeware as a service to laptop and energy-conscious home users. The Unix subsystems on Mac OS X were originally written for machines that were typically never shut off. Mac OS X inherits this assumption in version 1.0, and has many system maintenance tasks that are scheduled to run between 3 am and 5 am. In addition, there are scripts designed to run weekly on weekends, and once a month in the middle of the night.>>

http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/

And while you're there, do yourself a favor and try Brickhouse:

BrickHouse 1.1b6
<<BrickHouse is designed to make using the network firewall built in to Mac OS X quick and easy. By using BrickHouse to enable your computer's firewall, you can help prevent unauthorized villians from gaining access to your computer via your internet connection.>>


POPmonitor X *-* 1.1.1
<<With POPmonitor you can take a peek inside your mailbox and delete unwanted e-mail without the need to download those messages first. Just login to your mailbox, select the unwanted messages and click 'Delete'. It's as simple as that.>>

http://www.vechtwijk.nl/dev/index.html

Skeleton Key *-* 1.3
<<Skeleton Key uses a simple drag-and-drop interface to allow you to execute programs or open files as root just by dragging them onto the Skeleton Key icon (and entering your administrator password, of course).>>

http://www.spectralclass.com/software/downloads/skeleton.dmg.gz

BatChmod *-* 1.2
<<BatChmod is a new Cocoa utility for manipulating file and folder privileges in Mac OS X (10.1 recommended). It allows the manipulation of ownership as well as the privileges associated to the Owner, Group or others.>>

* It allows one to change any specific privilege or ownership without affecting the others (ie, changing the group without affecting the owner, or adding or removing a specific privilege without affecting all the others)
* It can recursively affect enclosed folders
* It's basically a mix of the Unix commands chown, chgrp and chmod...
* it can Force Empty the Trash

http://homepage.mac.com/arbysoft/


They are all freeware, except Brickhouse (shareware), but if you want to try out BrickHouse, there are no restrictions upon the unregistered version.


Cheers...