Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks

Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks by nikcub on Tuesday April 12, 2011 @04:34AM (#2436403)

The big one that I went through recently was killing startup items. You tend to hoard them over time, especially with a dev machine.

Look in, and clear out in /Library/StartupItems and /System/Library/StartupItems

Like any good UNIX, there are a dozen other ways that applications can launch themselves in OS X, so run a ps and find processes that you don't need and figure out where they are being started.

I alias everything in bash to run the scripts manually when I need them (eg. 'apu' starts apache, 'ngu' starts nginx, 'vbx' sets up virtualbox). Saves a ton of memory and gets boot time down to seconds rather than minutes.

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Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks by haribilalic on Tuesday April 12, 2011 @05:57AM (#2436548)

Check out Lingon [1] for a nice front-end to launchd to modify its start-up items. It lets you quickly schedule items, such as bash scripts, in launchd too.

1. http://www.peterborgapps.com/lingon/ for $4.99 or http://sourceforge.net/projects/lingon/ for a free, older version.

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Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks by experimental on Tuesday April 12, 2011 @11:52PM (#2440683)

I trust you know what you are doing. I'd like to warn others to be careful of what is removed, especially if you didn't put it there. The price is stability.

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Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks by experimental on Wednesday April 13, 2011 @04:24AM (#2441252)

Can somebody explain how this doesn't contribute to the discussion? I was trying not to tell nikcub something they may already know, and trying to be helpful for anyone else while not making assumptions on the knowledge of anyone else.

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Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks by nikcub on Wednesday April 13, 2011 @08:26AM (#2441810)

I have no idea, I thought it was a valid point and probably something I should have mentioned

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Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks by whimsy on Tuesday April 12, 2011 @05:28AM (#2436487)

Are you doing anything fancy inside vbx, or is it just a copy of the startup item?

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Re:Mac OS X hidden features and nice tips & tricks by nikcub on Tuesday April 12, 2011 @07:52AM (#2436759)

it is just a shell script that lets me do:

vbx xp1

vbx ie7

etc. to setup the network and start the vm with that name

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