Tag: Apple

OS X – How to Search For a Substring Inside of GZIP and BZ2 Files

This tip is really a generic *Nix command so it should not only work in OS X but also in other flavors of UNIX such as Linux.

In OS X a lot of the log files are auto-archived into compressed GZIP files in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) and BZ2 files in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). If you need to search for an occurrence of a word or other string of text in a compressed GZIP file, you can use the following terminal command:

zgrep someString theLogFileName.log.gz

As an example, say you want to search for the word “error” in a compressed system log in Tiger. To do this you would launch the Terminal application and run the command:

zgrep error /var/log/system.log.0.gz

Alternatively you can search all compressed system log files in a single command by using an asterisk (*) as a “wild card” character:

zgrep error /var/log/system.log*

Leopard uses the BZ2 compression scheme for most of its log files and you can similarly search those files by using the bzgrep command. For example, say you wanted to search all the application firewall logs for instances of the word “connection”. To do this you would run the following command in the Terminal application:

bzgrep connection /var/log/appfirewall.log*

If you need to search for a string that consists of more than one word separated by spaces, you would need to surround the search string in quotation marks:

bzgrep "connection attempt" /var/log/appfirewall.log*

Sherlock

Apple XServe RAID Discontinued

It looks like Apple has decided to discontinue its XServe RAID product. When you go to the XServer storage page, there is no sign of the Apple branded XServe RAID product. All that is shown is a RAID hardware product manufactured by Promise Technology. The XServe RAID had a lot of faults so I guess Apple decided to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and let someone else with more experience handle the hardware.Promise RAID

OS X – How to Hide a Partition from the Finder

Go to the Terminal and issue the command:

sudo setfile -a V /Volumes/paritionName

where “partitionName” is the name of the partition or drive that you want to hide. This hides the partition from being seen in the Finder but you can still access it from the terminal such as with scripts.