How To Move And Copy Files On The Same Mac Drive. Understanding the way the file handling system works in Mac OS will help you make your workflow more efficient. Once you learn the different ways of moving the files around, backing up files on your Mac will become effortless. Failing finding it, Recovery downloads the currently installed version of macOS (or OS X), which is about 5GB. When complete, it installs it and reboots, and places the installer in the. Even with Mac OS X 10.5.4 and a MobileMe update, however, Mac users just won't see the same level of speed when they make changes from the computer itself.

If you’ve been using a Mac for any length of time, you know that it’s more than just a pretty point-and-click, window-and-icon interface. Beneath the surface of the operating system is an entire world that you can access only from the command line. Terminal (in your /Applications/Utilities folder) is the default gateway to that command line on a Mac. With it, instead of pointing and clicking, you type your commands and your Mac does your bidding.

Why would you want to do that? For almost all of your computing needs, the regular graphical user interface is enough. But the command line can be handy when it comes to troubleshooting your Mac, to turn on “hidden” settings, and other advanced chores. It’s a good idea for anyone who isn’t an utter beginner to be familiar with it.

If you aren’t already familiar with your Mac’s command-line interface. First up: How to navigate the file system from the command-line prompt.

The prompt

By default, when you open Terminal, the first thing you’ll see is something like this:

The first line shows the last time you logged into your Mac via the command line; that’s the current time, when you’re using Terminal. The second line is the prompt, and while it can change from system to system depending on configuration, by default it contains several bits of information.

In my prompt, walden is the name of my Mac (same as the name in the Sharing pane of System Preferences), and kirk is my user name. The ~ shows where I am in the file system of my Mac; ~ is a shortcut that means the current user’s home folder. (In the Finder, that’s the folder with your user name and the house icon.) Finally, the $ is a character that the bash shell (the default interface that Terminal uses) displays to indicate that it’s ready to accept a command.

What’s in a folder

When you first get to the command line, you’re in your home folder. While you’re there—or when you’re in any folder (directory in Unix-speak)—you might want to know what’s in it. To do that you use the ls (or list) command. Type ls and press the Return key, and you’ll see the folders (and/or files) in the current directory.

The output of the plain ls command is pretty sparse; it shows you the names of files and folders contained in the current directory (including some familiar ones such as Movies, Music, Pictures, and so on). Fortunately, you can add a number of optional switches to the ls command that allow you to see more information. So, for example, try typing ls -l (that’s a lower-case L), then pressing Return. You’ll see something like this:

Don’t worry too much about what all that means right now; we’re just getting our feet wet. The point is that ls can provide additional information about files and folders, depending on the options you specify. In this case, that additional information includes the name of the user who owns each item in the directory. (That ownership is part of the Unix system’s file-permissions regime.) The kirk kirk next to most of those items above means that each one is owned by the user kirk, who is in the group kirk. The other understandable bit of information next to each file and folder is the date and time each one was last modified.

One other handy option: You can view invisible files—ones that the Finder doesn’t normally show you—by typing ls -a. (These hidden files all have dots (.) in front of their names.)

Moving around

When you’re in the Finder and you want to move to another folder, you find that folder and double-click it. From the command line, you use the cd (or change directory) command instead. So let’s say you’re in your Home folder and want to peek inside the Downloads folder. To do that, you’d type cd Downloads. (Remember to always type a space after any command that has an additional argument, such as the name of a directory in the previous example.) Once you’ve done that, ls will show you the contents of your Downloads folder.

Here are a couple of quick tricks for moving around in your Mac’s file system.

• If you type cd and press the Return key—with no directory specified—you’ll go back to your Home folder. (You can also type cd ~ to go there.)
• If you type cd /, you’ll go to the root level of your startup disk.
• If you type cd .. (that’s two periods), you’ll go to the directory above the one you’re currently in. So if you’re in your home folder, and type cd .., you’ll go to your Mac’s /Users folder.
• And if you type cd - (hyphen) you’ll go back to the directory you were in before the last time you issued the cd command.

To learn more Terminal commands, see our articles on how to copy and move folders as well as delete files and folders using the command line and get help when you need it from man pages.

Don't Push Me Armadillo Mac Os Catalina

One potential issue with this, especially for non 3G owners, is that using the IDLE command requires that the Mail.app keep an open connection with the server. If I'm not using WiFi on non-3G phones, this means that it will have to keep a constantly open EDGE connection.
When EDGE is connected, you can't receive any incoming phone calls. They will all be forwarded to voice mail since you are 'on the phone'.
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Capt Cosmic

Oops. Misread the post. Was thinking it was talking about setting up iPhone email. Never mind.
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Capt Cosmic

When using the idle support in Mail.app many people experience issues with new mail sounds or sounds triggered from scripts not playing or playing much later than expected.

What you need: Play Sound. Save it in you Applications folder.

Save the script in ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/ and attach it to your ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-youraccount@domain.com/INBOX.imapmbox/Messages/ folder.

Disclaimer: This is my sixth applescript, it just might set your LP1 on fire.

The 'Use IDLE...' check box is disabled for me (it is greyed out). Does this mean my server does not support IDLE?

Either server doesn't or it's not an IMAP account

I did not have to disable the automatic checking for the account to get the idle working. In fact, idle was selected automatically when I set up the IMAP account. (And I switched it immediately I received my first push e-mail, much prefer the check-once-per-hour method.)

So, from a person who doesn't use IMAP, I believe I'm assuming correctly that this is about the set up of IMAP and not POP accounts in Mail.app?

Yes. IDLE is strictly an IMAP protocol.

There is similar functionality for pop3 users. A finger request is sent to a user whenever mail arrives for that user. Client software listening on port 79 can then tell your email program to check mail. Works very well. I use a client called notifymail, that doesn't seem to be available anymore. But it is possible to write a script to do this.

Am I missing something? This didn't work for me....
I have a MobileMe IMAP account. In Mail preferences IDLE was 'on' by default. I unchecked 'Include when automatically checking for new mail'. I sent myself mail, both from Mail.app and from the command line at 5:30 AM this morning. When I checked again at 6:30 AM there was no new mail. I clicked 'Get Mail' and the two test messages came along with a bunch of other new mail.
Is some other step required to enable push (IDLE) on a MobileMe IMAP account?
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Mike Newman
Saipan and Narita Layover Pages:
http://www.mgnewman.com

I had the same experience (or lack thereof). I followed the instructions to the letter, but this trick worked neither for Gmail nor MobileMe.

Still running 10.4.11, and I can't find any setting for enabling IDLE support in Mail.app. Is this a Leopard only feature?
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Capt Cosmic

Don't Push Me Armadillo Mac Os X

I'll second the notion that this may be a 10.5 only feature as I can't find it in OS X 10.4.11 and Mail.app v2.1.3. This hint should probably be moved to the Leopard section.
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'DON'T PANIC'
Douglas Adams

You do not need to turn off the periodic checking for IDLE to work.

If you turned off periodic checking and enabled IDLE, would you still get messages received when your computer was offline? Would your IMAP account be updated to reflect changes made from another computer? I am not sure of the answer to either question.
-Mark

I set the IDLE-command in Mail app and manual looking for new mail. Push works perfectly in Mail.app. I also noticed events get pushed directly from my iPhone into iCal on my mac. Great!

Don't Push Me Armadillo Mac Os 11

Does not work reliably for me, neither with Gmail nor with the Exchange server at work. When I first configured the Exchange (with IDLE) account it seemed to work. Then I configured my Gmail account to use IMAP (with IDLE) and found that the only way to retrieve new mail was to check for it, so I went back to POP. Then my Exchange account stopped working with IDLE, so I'm back to automatically checking all accounts every minute.

See my following post for more information on this. I figured out how to make this work.

I figured out how to make my Gmail work with IMAP (IDLE) in Mail.
There seems to be something wrong with the way that Apple Mail auto-configures Gmail accounts when you create a Gmail account in Mail. I couldn't get my Gmail to work with IMAP (IDLE) either, so I completely deleted my Gmail account from Mail and recreated it.
BUT the catch is that when I recreated the account, I typed in a completely random email address like xyz@123.com. This was the trick which bypassed whatever internal mechanisms Mail has for setting up a Gmail account.
Once the fake account was setup, I manually modified all the account information with all the appropriate Gmail IMAP settings.
And now, guess what?! My IMAP (IDLE) works just fine with my Gmail account in Mail! The Gmail emails are pushed to me instantaneously!

Don't Push Me Armadillo Mac Os 10

Have just done this myself, and push Gmail now works perfectly within the Mail app.
Note that when asked what type of account this is, I selected IMAP (as opposed to Exchange 2007 IMAP), and it works fine with this.
Many thanks!