Due to a problem with contact synchronization (not sure what was the source of the problem, probably a program crash on powercut, which caused inconsistency in contact's database file), the synchronization process created nearly 7M files in Images/:

hostname:Images username$ pwd
/Users/username/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources/4D81D34B-C932-4578-8A31-4E2E244B3875/Images

hostname:Images username$ ls
^C

hostname:Images username$ ls | wc -l
 6797073
(the result was after hours)

hostname:Images username$ cd ..
hostname:4D81D34B-C932-4578-8A31-4E2E244B3875 username$ ls -l
total 600224
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff     409600 Aug  2 17:43 AddressBook-v22.abcddb
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff      32768 Aug  3 00:13 AddressBook-v22.abcddb-shm
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff    2727472 Aug  2 23:26 AddressBook-v22.abcddb-wal
drwx------  65535 username  staff  231100550 Aug  2 23:26 Images
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff      45056 Dec  7  2017 MailRecents-v4.abcdmr
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff      32768 Dec  7  2017 MailRecents-v4.abcdmr-shm
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff       4152 Dec  7  2017 MailRecents-v4.abcdmr-wal
drwx------      5 username  staff        170 Feb 26 18:51 Metadata
-rwxr-xr-x      1 username  staff          0 Dec  7  2017 OfflineDeletedItems.plist.lockfile
-rwxr-xr-x      1 username  staff          0 Dec  7  2017 Sync.lockfile
-rwxr-xr-x      1 username  staff          0 Dec  7  2017 SyncOperations.plist.lockfile

When I tried to use shell tools (ls, find), I did not get any result in time reasonable for interactive work (it was hours), regardless of disabling file sorting like ls -f (what [seems to help in case of other UNIX-like OSs](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/120077/the-ls-command-is-not-working-for-a-directory-with-a-huge-number-of-files)) etc. The ls process has grown to around 1GB in size and worked for HOURS before outputting any result. My question is - am I missing some tricky option to have this working reasonably for large directories (outputting the results on the way, eg. to process further, filter etc.) or these tools are just not written to scale? Or maybe there are better file/directory utilities for MacOSX? (I haven't tried any GUI app on that directory, thinking better not to...). I have written a fairly trivial C program reading the directory entries and outputting the info on the way:

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

int main( const int argc,
	      const char * const * argv )
{
    const char * const dirpath = argv[ 1 ];
    DIR * const dirp = opendir( dirpath );
    if ( dirp == NULL )
	    return -1;

    int count = 0;
    struct stat statbuf;

    for ( struct dirent * entry = readdir( dirp );
	      entry != NULL;
	      entry = readdir( dirp ), count++ )
    {
       char filepath[ PATH_MAX + 1 ];
       memset( filepath, 0, PATH_MAX );
       strncat( filepath, dirpath, PATH_MAX );
       strncat( filepath, "/", PATH_MAX );
       strncat( filepath, entry->d_name, PATH_MAX );
       stat( filepath, &statbuf );
       printf( "%s %llu\n", entry->d_name, statbuf.st_size );
    }
    closedir( dirp );
    printf( "%d", count );

    return 0;
}

which actually does work (outputs the result after reading each entry) and has memory footprint of around 300K. So it is not a problem of the OS (filesystem, driver, standard library or whatever), but the tools which basically do not scale well (I know they support more options etc., but for a basic directory listing, without sorting or anything fancy ls should work better, ie. not allocate 1GB of memory, while find should do the action for each entry it finds (and matches), not read them all first, as it apparently does...). Has anyone experienced this and has a good solution how to deal with such huge directories (what utilities to use) on MacOSX? (Or maybe writing some custom system utility is necessary in such case?) (It is an exceptional situation of course, occurred for the first time on my system - but the OS supports such large directories, and the basic shell tools should deal with them in a _reasonable_ way...) EDIT: Small fix in the program (the filepath was lacking '/').

I use a 2023 M2 MBP running Ventura 13.7.2. To augment Apple's rather paltry offerings of CL utilities, I depend on MacPorts. Unfortunately, MacPorts does not have a replacement/alternative for whereis. If you've ever used Apple's native whereis you may have noticed that it has some ***shortcomings***; e.g.:

/usr/bin/whereis find
find: /usr/bin/find /opt/local/libexec/gnubin/man/man1/find.1.gz

First - it only reports on native apps**See EDIT 1 below**. Its **app** searches are restricted by Apple, and apparently this cannot be over-ridden by any user. Second - as you can see above, it has no such restrictions on searching for manuals. In this case, it reports on the manual location for the find tool which was installed from MacPorts. Third - the native whereis found the manpage for find without benefit of the MANPATH environment variable - it is not set on my system. Fourth - AFAIK, that leaves only manpath (another Apple-sourced CL utility) as a resource for finding the location of manuals. However, **as I read** man manpath - it's not getting it from there either! So that's my question: How does Apple's whereis command find the location of system manuals? Have I mis-read man manpath? Can someone explain the process? Also, I'd be interested to know if Apple publishes the source files for manpath and whereis. --- #### EDIT 1: "What is meant by native apps?" From man whereis on my system (dated "August 22, 2002, for macOS 13.7"): >The default path searched is the string returned by the sysctl(8) utility for the “user.cs_path” string, with /usr/libexec and the current user's $PATH appended. On my system:

% sysctl user.cs_path
user.cs_path: /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

WRT ***"... Its app searches are restricted by Apple, and apparently this cannot be over-ridden by any user."***: You may refer to [this post](https://github.com/seamusdemora/seamusdemora.github.io/blob/master/MacStuff.md#39-whereis-vs-which-and-why-Apple-sucks) which was based on some research I did a while ago. Referring to man sysctl on my current mac, is the following: >COMPATIBILITY The -w option has been deprecated and is silently ignored.

Coming from Windows I have gotten extremely used to the Windows Snap feature, which resizes a window when it's dragged to the screen edges. However, it's not built into OS X. Are there any 3rd party utilities that add this functionality?

MacOs Ventura 13.6.1, I don't recall seeing two Utilities folders before. In fact I thought it was impossible to have identically-named files (or folders) in the same location (Applications in this case). What's going on?

I found there is some differences between the utility command I used on the mac OSX and linux. I want to make my experience united. How could I replace all my mac utilities with GNU utilities?

I'd like to do **something** with my windows on OS X, where **something** includes options like re-arranging, moving, re-sizing, remembering positions, cloning across Spaces, etc. What options exist? ### Rules - **One** app per answer. - Use this format for the first two lines of your answer: **## [app name](link to website)** **[App Store](link to appstore) (price)** - **Check for duplicates** before adding new answers. - If you find a duplicate, vote it down and encourage its poster to upvote the original entry instead (and remove the dupe). - Include short **description** about what this Window Managing app does. - What makes this Window Manager app different than the others? - Is it focused on re-sizing using only the keyboard? - Is it focused on moving using only mouse gestures? - Etc.

ES Explorer is using over 50GB on my iPhone 12 mini (~57.7GB): I don't see anything in ES Explorer: How can I empty it without reinstalling it?

When I execute the xattr command, it returns the error:

`
/usr/local/bin/xattr: /usr/local/opt/python@3.11/bin/python3.11: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

` file /usr/bin/xattr returns:

`
/usr/bin/xattr: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64e:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e]
/usr/bin/xattr (for architecture x86_64):   Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/usr/bin/xattr (for architecture arm64e):   Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e

` which python3 returns /usr/bin/python3 and my env doesn't have any python entries. This is my .zshrc file:

`
export PATH="/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"
export PATH="/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"

# Created by pipx on 2023-11-25 17:42:38
export PATH="$PATH:/Users/rhpt/.local/bin"

` I do not have python 3.11 but I do have python 3.12 installed. Running Sonoma 14.2 on an Intel iMac. I do not understand why xattr is trying to execute a python script. How can I get Terminal to use the executable instead of trying to execute python?

I know there are general solutions out there to deal with problems ejecting hard drives, but I'd like to get more specific and understand what applications are causing problems so that I can deal with them without closing *every* app or by logging out when I'm in the middle of working. Or worse still to be unable to reformat an external disk or to do disk operations like create a bootable installer which is what prompted me to ask this question. Looking in the Activity Monitor > Disk Tab didn't seem to be very helpful. I'd have to go by a hunch and check the info for an app, look at Open Files and Ports tab, scan the Open Files for directories that match the problematic disk and or volume. This process is needlessly tedious. There's got to be a better way. I'd like to be able to use an Application or a Terminal command, point to the disk or volume in question and have it return what Applications are preventing the disk from ejecting. Are there software or utilities that specialize in preventing applications from needlessly molesting external drives? I would consider a well written script/service. I don't mind using command line utilities to get the job done. I was considering downloading Little Flocker again and seeing if I could apply it to my external drives. Every application would be blocked from accessing my external drives until I aprove it or make a rule via Little Flocker. But apparently Little Flocker was bought out by F-Secure :(. For what it's worth I'm on MacOS Sierra V. 10.12.5

I followed the instructions in How to use Preview for Basic Image Editing: Remove Backgrounds and Extract Shapes to use the Preview app to remove backgrounds with an image. The problem is that the "Instant Alpha" tool sometimes does not capture all the pixels and can't figure out how to use the rectangle tool to remove those remaining pixels. I tried highlighting the pixels and then pressing delete but it doesn't work. Can someone explain how to do it or recommend another free, lightweight Mac OS X tool to remove background to make it transparent? I do not want to use Photoshop or anything else expensive.

I would like to compute how much "true" APFS disk space is used by a folder. This folder has many APFS "cloned" versions of the same files. A "true" count of the disk space used would only count each of these clones once. One thought I've had is to do this: 1. Go through each file in the folder, recursively. 2. Somehow determine, for each file, which physical location on the drive that file maps to. 3. Build an array of these locations for all files; prune duplicates when they appear (which would be clones). 4. Get the total computed size. I am curious if one could use this kind of method to get the true size of the folder. I'm also curious if there are any existing utilities to do this, or if not, how I could implement this on my own. Perhaps using fcntl and F_LOG2PHYS, from [this answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/65241088/2762570) ?

I have an Apple Silicon machine with FileVault enabled, and when I boot into macOS Recovery, it asks for a password before letting me use the utilities etc. I have forgotten my password, so I cannot get past this initial password recovery app screen, but I need to use the integrated utilities. I want to install macOS on a separate partition without erasing the existing installation and my data. I have not found anything for a situation like this online. *If somebody has an idea of how I can skip the password recovery utility and get to the macOS install tool, please help.* **Additional info:** I do know what the password could be, but I entered it incorrectly and now when I boot into the normal OS, it does not even try to check whether my password is incorrect or not. I do not know why this is since I did not use all 10 attempts before the password or the recovery key can only be entered in the Recovery OS for another 10 attempts each. (According to the apple support page regarding password logins) I know that the Mac has stopped processing my password attempts in the normal OS because the password field immediately shakes after pressing enter without any delay at all and because I can try as many different combinations as I want without the message "Wait - minutes before next try". I lost the recovery key. So I can't log in normally.

I am on macOS El Captain (upgrading to High Sierra soon) and I'm looking for a tool which can trigger an AppleScript or shell script every time when the number of monitors/displays attached to the system changes. I have tried [*ControlPlane*](https://www.controlplaneapp.com/) , but could not get the trigger on attached-display-change to work. Two questions: 1) Does anybody know that display triggering in *ControlPlane* definitely works on macOS El Captain and higher? (Indicating that I am doing something wrong.) Or: 2) Is there another tool which can act on a change of numbers of displays every time a monitor/display is (dis-)connected? *** **PS**: I am aware there are other questions in the StackExchange network relating to this topic (like [How can I run a script whenever I plug in an external monitor?](https://superuser.com/questions/170545/how-can-i-run-a-script-whenever-i-plug-in-an-external-monitor) or [Reset Mac OS X Windows Position after de-attaching external monitor](https://superuser.com/questions/331/reset-mac-os-x-windows-position-after-de-attaching-external-monitor)) , but the answers do not seem to apply to El Captain/High Sierra .

When I attempt to execute xattr in Terminal, I get Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/xattr-2.7", line 33, in import xattr ImportError: No module named xattr What's going on here? I thought xattr was part of Darwin . Is xattr written in Python? Does it require a Python package to be installed on my system?

I think Activity Monitor can be used for managing/monitoring processes, but I am confused about the other four: disk/memory/IO/file. Are all these four functions be managed/monitored out by Disk Utility?

I'm trying to use ColorSync Utility calculator on macOS Big Sur 11.6.5. And it doesn't work. I cannot pick a correct color. The color picker looks through any application windows disregarding them and picks only colors of the respective areas on the Desktop background behind those windows. The only app window which works is ColorSync Utility itself. How do I fix it and make it work?

I have transferred my system from Mac to Mac for over 15 years. I have preference files and other plists lurking around in my system for programs I tested years ago. Is there a smart program that could point me to these orphan files knowing that the application that created them is not on my system?

On Windows, I use [TeraCopy](http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php) for improved file copying. Are there any similar equivalents for OS X? In particular, I'd like to see things like copy speed.

I know that there were some 3rd party apps that could do this in the past, but with each new version of Mac OS X, it seems that many of those 3rd party apps stop working or the project ages and loses it's maintainer. I'm wondering if there is a Mac OS X built-in keyboard shortcut to do this. I suppose this wouldn't be limited to finder windows, but for windows of any application.

I’m helping someone with their old laptop (17”, mid-2009, if that matters). I restarted with cmdR to load OSX Utilities, and I used Disk Utility to wipe Macintosh HD, overwriting it three times and formatted as OS X Extended (Journaled). Afterwards, after successfully connecting to my Wi-Fi, I clicked on Reinstall OS X, and it’s giving me the option to set up El Capitan (the OS X that’s installed, and from what I can tell, the latest that can be installed). But when I hit continue, it gives me an error message: > An error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again. I get the same message every time I try. So I thought I’d try quitting OS X Utilities without reinstalling OS X and see what happens. After clicking on Choose Startup Disk, I get a blank list to choose from, with a restart button. No startup disks are available. Clicking restart, as one might expect, yields the following error message: > **You can’t change the startup disk to the selected disk.** > >Startup Disk could not gather enough information on the selected disk. So I quit Startup Disk and went back to Disk Utility, and I tried running First Aid on both Macintosh HD and OS X Base System. Neither one had any issues. So what is my issue? Did I mess up when wiping the hard drive? Do I just need to reformat it? Is there anything I can do, or have I rendered this computer a hunk of junk? Also, how do I prevent this in the future?