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Table of GNU-to-BSD command differences on macOS: find -printf becomes find -ls or -exec stat; sed -i needs an empty ''; date -d becomes date -v or -j -f; stat -c becomes stat -f; with a note that brew install coreutils provides gdate, gstat, and greadlink.

Why Your Linux Commands Fail on macOS (BSD vs GNU)

macOS’s command-line tools come from BSD, not the GNU coreutils that ship with most Linux distributions. They cover the same ground, but their flags don’t always match — so a command copied straight from a… 
Three verified macOS Terminal commands in a table: printf '%s' "user:pw" | base64 gives dXNlcjpwdw==; base64 -d

How to Encode and Decode Base64 on macOS

macOS ships a base64 command at /usr/bin/base64, so there’s nothing to install — it’s the FreeBSD version, which differs from the GNU one on Linux in a couple of ways worth knowing. This covers encoding… 
Homebrew install prefixes on macOS: on Apple Silicon brew --prefix returns /opt/homebrew, on Intel it returns /usr/local, above a row of common verbs install, list, upgrade, cleanup, services, bundle dump.

How to Install and Use Homebrew on macOS

Homebrew is the package manager most Mac developers use to install command-line tools and apps from the Terminal. This covers installing it, the commands you’ll use day to day, running background services, backing up your… 
Two columns comparing a PATH before and after macOS path_helper runs: on the left, /opt/homebrew/bin set in ~/.zprofile sits at position 1 above /usr/bin and /bin; on the right, after /etc/zprofile runs path_helper, /opt/homebrew/bin has moved to position 14, below /usr/bin and /bin.

How to Add to PATH on macOS

Adding a directory to your PATH is how you get macOS to find a command by name instead of typing its full location every time. There’s more than one way to do it, and which… 
Dark terminal card headed Two ways to hide a file, showing ls -lO output where flagged.txt carries hidden in the file flags column while visible.txt carries a dash, and ls -ldO on the Library folder showing it also carries the hidden flag despite having no dot in its name, with labels reading a leading dot or the hidden flag and user name redacted

How to Show Hidden Files on a Mac

There is a keyboard shortcut that shows hidden files in the Finder immediately, and for most people that is the entire answer. What trips people up comes after: some files stay out of sight even…