7 useful mac os x command line tools

Mac OS X has Darwin Unix like os. There are command line tools you can use in the console.

1. brew is a command to install other command line tools for mac os x.
To install brew and add the brew binary into the PATH, run the following commands in the console.

mkdir homebrew && curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C homebrew;

echo export PATH=`pwd`/homebrew/bin:'$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc;

source ~/.bashrc;

which brew;

The last command "which brew;" should give the full path to brew binary file.

Now you have brew command available, you can install other command line tools easily.

2. pigz is a tool that is gzip equivalent but runs faster by exploiting parallel computing. pigz is useful when you need to unzip contents with gzip or zlib format. For example, you rabbitmq messages might be zlib compressed, then base64 encoded. Your decoding commands might looks funny:
base64 -D input.txt | pigz -d -z -c

To install pigz, issue the following command:
brew install pigz

3. apache bench (ab) is a command line tool that allows you to bench mark web sites. The most useful flag is -c, which allows you to specify the number of concurrent http requests sent to the host each time.
For example:

ab -n 100000 -c 10 -t 30 http://xyzcode.blogspot.com/

the above commands send total 10000 requests to xyzcode.blogspot.com, each time, 10 concurrent requests are sent.

ab is installed by default on mac os x, type which ab to check out. In case it is missing, you can install it with command:
brew install ab

4. pybot is a command line tool that automate stuff like ssh, web browsing etc. It is equivalent to have a robot to type the keyboard and read the screen then act upon it for you.

To install pybot, issue the following command:
brew install robot-framework

Since brew also installed python's package management tool, you can also use pip to install pybot:
pip install robotframework

5. in case pybot is an overkill for you, you can use expect command to automate ssh chat with remote hosts like a robot. Expect commands expect input, then send the response without any user interaction.
expect script is installed by default, check the installation path with
which expect;

6. zgrep is a better tool than grep.
zgrep allows you to grep content in zip files and normal files. It will be useful to search something in current log and backup logs.
The flexible syntax really compliments your searching strategy. So if you know the log will looks like

2018-11-07 16:42:25-05 HostNameppp Sophos Installer[72881]: [SGCCDFSBroker.m:306] Feedback json file was successfully uploaded (status code: 201).

Your searching strategy could be:
zgrep -i 'Sophos.*json.*successful' /var/log/install.log

each .* separated string became a filter string, so that you can narrow down the search.

You can use or syntax like:
zgrep -i 'Sophos.*json.*successful' /var/log/install.log | grep --color '72881\|72889'

zgrep is installed by default
which zgrep; will give you the installation location.

7. mysql is a command line tool to query mysql database. It allows you scripting mysql queries. You can pipe the result into zgrep to search relevant information.

mysql --host mysql.local -uuser -ppass -e 'select * from ct_prov.Student\G'

to install mysql command line tool
brew install mysql