Mac – What are useful Command-line Commands on Mac OS X

command-line-interfacemacmac-osx-serverosx-leopard

Per the Windows and Linux threads, what commands do you find most useful in Mac OS X Server (or Client)?

say "some text"

Famously used for getting people back into their apartments, say takes your arguments and reads them aloud through the audio output device.

A little known one is

getmac

It shows the MAC address(es) of your network adapter(s).

Screenshot of running getmac from a Windows commandline window.

The commands dig and host should be what you're looking for ;)

On *nix systems, you can use this command:

dig -x [address]

Alternatively, you can add +short at the end of the dig command to output only the DNS result.

There's also nslookup on both *nix and Windows systems for reverse DNS requests.