Mount and install OS X packages from the command line

If you need to install a .pkg application wrapped in a .dmg file from the command line (say, if you only have SSH access to the machine) there are a few command line utilities that will let you do this. For instance, let's say you're trying to install DarwinPorts on a remote OS X box.

cd ~/Desktop

curl -O http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/downloads/DarwinPorts-1.2-10.4.dmg

hdiutil attach DarwinPorts-1.2-10.4.dmg

cd /Volumes/DarwinPorts-1.2/

sudo installer -pkg DarwinPorts-1.2.pkg -target "/"

hditutil detach /Volumes/DarwinPorts-1.2/

In a nutshell, this 1) goes to your Desktop folder 2) grabs DarwinPorts from the opendarwin site 3) mounts the dmg 4) goes to the newly mounted DarwinPorts volume 5) installs the package, targeted to the root, as the root user 6) ejects the mounted disc image.

get rid of mac's ._ meta files on unix command line

When a mac accesses storage not formatted in it's own HFS format, it stores it's additional metadata about the file in another file named the same but starting with "._" It can be annoying and when you're accessing a remote volume that's source control managed with subversion, they show up your status information. This bash shell script will get remove of all ._metadata files residing below the current working directory.

#!/bin/sh
for i in `find . -regex '.*\._.*'`; do rm $i; echo "removing $i"; done

If you save that as "/home/$USER/bin/cleanup" and do a "chmod 777 /home/$USER/bin/cleanup" it will be available next time you open a terminal by just typing "cleanup".