macOS command-line tools you might not know about

Is there a place Apple documents these things? Do people find these things with something like “ls /usr/bin” and wondering “what is this?” or does Apple have an administrator’s guide somewhere? Or has someone written a good book with this stuff?

Hi, author here. There isn't any official canonical documentation that I know of, outside of the individual man pages. This was a list of commands I've been maintaining for myself over the years and thought it would be useful to share.

If you want more like this, I also have another page full of lesser well-known macOS tips and tricks: https://saurabhs.org/macos-tips

Oh my, and a bucket load of iOS tips too!

TIL you can tap and drag with 2 fingers to multi-select list items in mail and notes, etc

Bless you for finding and collating

I'd love some official Apple documentation. In lieu of that, you can search man pages with `man -f`, `whatis`, or `apropos`. I also keep the following aliases in my ~/.zshrc:

  alias list-functions='functions -x4'
  alias list-function-names='functions +'
  alias list-aliases='alias'
  alias list-alias-names='alias +'
  alias list-commands='print -raC2 ${(kv)commands} | sort'
  alias list-command-names='print -roC1 ${(k)commands}'
  alias list-builtins='print -raC2 ${(kv)builtins} | sort'
  alias list-builtin-names='print -roC1 ${(k)builtins}'
  alias list-everything='whence -cm "[^_]*"'
  alias list-everything-names='whence -wm "[^_]*"'

Edit: another commenter posted what looks to be comprehensive docs/lists here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36492487