macOS command-line tools you might not know about

I just freaked out my cat using `say`. I'm going to enjoy this too much.

I used to work at a 24 hr end user tech support call center. They didn’t use Macs, but we had a machine for the techs to use to understand what the customer is looking at. I wrote a script to sleep until late at night then start saying weird/creepy stuff to mess with the overnight crew.

Combined with the `yes` command is very good fun ;)

YEARS ago, when my nephew was young, he was playing with my mother's Macbook Air at Thanksgiving.

I administer that machine for her (to the extent that such a thing is needed), and so I knew (a) her login and (b) that SSH was open.

Me combining remote access with "say" made for a very memorable morning for that kid.

try it out with different voices, for starters try

  say "process failure" -v trinoids

you can find all the available voices with

  say -v '?' 

or from Accessibility>Spoken-Content>System-voice>Manage-voices

I liked the option of using `-v organ`

A nice feature I discovered recently is -a: you can give it a specific audio device, which falls back to the default if not present. I use it to report when builds finish through my monitor speakers in case I'm not wearing headphones. If I'm on the go and don't have the monitor connected it plays through the speakers.

We must rejoice in this morbid voice.