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GeekTool's new Tiger compatibility (and using it to build your own _Batcave_)

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.

mkb's picture

GeekTool was actually working fine...

GeekTool was actually working fine for me under Tiger, though it had only been a few days. After installing the branched version, GeekTool keeps disabling itself, forcing me to re-open the pref pane and re-enable it.

 
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