Single User Mode Commands
Back in the old days of computing, you had no choice but to navigate through your file system using what is called a terminal. That was before the time of GUI or graphical user interface. This is the most basic form of interacting with your machine, this is an art. For a while now, my fellow techs and I would occasionally write a terminal article teaching you some of the simple commands.
By entering Single User Mode you can give basic commands to the UNIX shell of the Mac OS just as if you were typing on an old UNIX terminal. This is NOT to be confused with the Terminal App in your Utility folder. Single User Mode and Verbose Mode are only available upon boot-up by holding special keys to get to the UNIX shell.
Now you may ask why do I need to learn this? Well, it is what divides the average user from the power user. It is one of the most powerful tools a user has in their arsenal, it cuts right through the pretty wrapper of macOS GUI. Single User mode has a plethora of uses, including troubleshooting. Let’s say your Mac will not complete its login, OH NO!! With the power of UNIX, you can troubleshoot part of the issue using this handy tool! Let’s get started.
First, boot your Mac and hold the Command and S keys, you are going to see a bunch of crazy lines of text than just a blinking curser. Type ‘df -h’ this will get a read-out of the disk space and amount used. Many times your Mac may not boot because your drive is filled to the max. This means the filesystem has no space to make the temporary files it needs to function. We always recommend that you leave at least 10% of your drive’s capacity vacant. That means if you have a 1TB drive you need 100GB free.
With the ‘df-h’ command you can see you if you have enough space or if your drive is more stuffed then Uncle Phil around the holidays. But you have enough space, now what? Maybe your filesystem has become corrupted, no, not the type of corruption that we see in our nation’s capital. Trust me, your computer can be trumped by corruption and that is not locker room talk! So before you tweet to your buddies in an angry rage, try running ‘fsck -fy ‘which is a file system repair. Now before you try any of this BACK UP YOUR MACHINE, there is no confirmation or undo in single user mode, it is all or nothing.
Another command you can use is ‘config’, which will give a list of your internet interfaces, i.e. wlan0 or eth0. It will also tell you if you have what is called an IP address which looks like this 192.168.1.xxx the xxx are your subset that gives you your address. If your mac is getting an IP address and you still get no interwebs the issue might be with your web browser or router so what is the next step? The ping command to the rescue! It works like this, you type ‘ping’ and then the web address i.e, ping google.com. If you have an IP address and cannot speak with the outside world your DNS setting not be working or your router could be broken.
When navigating in single user mode it is easy to get confused and lost, so you can use the ‘pwd’ command or present working directory, to give you the ‘you are here’ or if you want to see what paths you can take try the ‘LS’ command. This will list the next paths you can take in the directory. I can’t go into all the uses of the single user mode, I would need a book for that and I have computers to fix. But, hopefully, I leave you today knowing a little more about single user mode.
Life's a Beach
Call it what you will. “Beachball of Death”, “Pinwheel of Patience”, “Rainbow Wheel”, “Color Pizza”, “The Waiting Pie” (Yes, these are all names I’ve heard), we as mac os users are familiar with the dreaded and colourful menace. A few times a day I receive concerns from Mac users that there may be an issue with their machine as the pinwheel spins constantly. To be fair, a machine that displays the pinwheel for more than a handful of seconds may be trying to tell you a number of things.
If you’re attempting to open an application and your Mac pinwheels for more than a few seconds, try clicking on the Desktop. Most of the time that will free up your cursor and allow you to navigate to the Force Quit menu to shut down whichever application is gunking up your performance.
Should you see the pinwheel seemingly out of the blue, (eg. on startup), it could be indicative of full storage. It’s recommended you leave at least 10% of your storage disk free. In the About This Mac submenu, you can monitor your available and used storage space on your machine. If there is only a few Gb’s available, it may be time to do some deep cleaning. However, if you see plenty of storage available and your machine constantly pinwheels, it may be indicative of a hardware issue. In which case, you could take a trip to one of our locations to get it looked at.
Lastly, one of the most common instances of pinwheeling rests in browsing the Web. Safari is one app that often calls up the pinwheel when it’s dealing with a problematic web page. Typically you can fix this by hitting the ‘x’ symbol in the web address field to stop the page from loading or just close the window altogether.
Happy December, Tech Tails readers!
We’ve got an informative edition for you today, and I want to lead off by talking about Apple’s ForceTouch Trackpad. A lot of you may own a Mac with one of these handy innovations attached to it, and if you do, you may have noticed that the TrackPad DOES NOT click when the computer is turned off. This has actually caused a few customers to believe they picked up a defective unit, and even freaked out a couple of our technicians at first! To me, this is still a bizarre concept, but a very cool one that makes me wonder about the future of keyboards and other input devices.
How does Apple do this? Using a Taptic Engine, the ForceTouch Trackpad creates the illusion of movement by generating feedback based on the amount of pressure you’ve applied. Unlike the previous design, which used a “diving board” design, these models are completely solid state, meaning the parts do not move. Now, this is not news to us, we have had this technology for a couple years now. The thing that WAS new to us was Trackpad issues being related to a user account. Our technicians were baffled to find the Trackpad of a MacBook mysteriously misbehaving ONLY when used by the primary user account. This issue was resolved by reinstalling the operating system. In the past, with “diving board” design trackpads, we would have never tried this measure to resolve such an issue.
The takeaway from a repair like this: you can never be too sure! As service providers, we are constantly learning. New OS features new repair guides, and all the parts and tools that are constantly evolving. If you’re experiencing some type of issue with your Mac, never rule out the possibility of software corruption. You would be surprised what elements of operation it can impact, especially if you consider the new class of Macs are dealing with these days.
Ever had an issue that appeared to be hardware, but ended up being resolved without repair? Let us know!
Patrick McCormack
patrickm@smalldog.com
