Posts Tagged ‘terminal’

Linux has a great tool called whereis that allows you to find the location of an executable. For example, if you want to know what PHP binary you are using, you could use the following command.

$ whereis php
/usr/local/php

However, if you run this on Mac it will often return you a black result, even though you know the command works!

$ whereis convert

The solution is to use which instead, which does the the same thing, but actually returns results.

$ which convert
/opt/local/bin/convert

Great for finding those extra mysterious programmes.

If you need to get a break down of how much space each directory is using, you can do that using the du command. Using a few choice options it will produce a list of all directories in the current folders and how big they are.

du -sch

Need to uncompress a .tar.gz file from the terminal? No problem.

tar xvzf filename.tar.gz