Mac Geekery - Geektool and Bash One-Liners

I’m an old-school fan of GeekTool, a smart little PreferencePane that lets you trick out your Mac’s Desktop background with a variety of customizable stats, photos, and status info. Most folks’ favorite use is to display the output of shell scripts and simple CLI commands (e.g. “cat ~/todo.txt” or “tail -n 10 /var/log/crashreporter.log”)

To be honest, I hadn’t used GeekTool in a while, but apparently there were some Tiger compatibility issues that were vexing fans. Now Mac Geekery’s rupa deadwyler points to a branched version (2nd item) that provides fixes for Tiger.

He also writes up a good post on a few of his favorite uses for GeekTool:

Processes

There’s a few ways to run this. Right now, I like:

ps -cm -U username | awk '/:/ && $5!~/Dashboard/'

c omits the full path of each process, m orders the processes by memory and -U username shows all processes owned by that user. Plain ps only shows processes run through the terminal, ps -A gives me more than I want to see, ps -U was pretty good, I thought. Replacing the m with r orders the processes by CPU usage, I haven’t really decided which one I like better.

My own favorite feature? Probably the least tech-y thing you can do with it: GeekTool can pull photos from the web on a regular schedule, which makes it easy to see weather, traffic, and web cam output right on your desktop (my Desktop, ca. 2004-11).

With a little bit of creativity, experimentation, and poking around, GeekTool can help you put together your own Information Batcave.