Darwin Ports useful commands

To update the ports
sudo port -d selfupdate

To search for and install a port, example program is fping
port search fping
sudo port install fping

More information can be found at
http://trac.macports.org/wiki/UsingMacPortsQuickStart

[Edit 19/07/2009]
This page looks like a very good resource on port commands:
http://guide.macports.org/#using.port

More pocket guides that I own

Favourite Pocket Guides

O'Reilly are one of my favourite publishers. When looking for a desktop manual their in a nutshell series is very useful. They also have a very good set of Pocket Guides, some of my favourite ones are:

Mac OS X boot options

When OS X (at least 10.5) is booting there are several key combinations that can be pressed for different modes:

C : Boot from CD or DVD
N : Attempt NetBoot server boot
R : Reset display for mac laptop
T : Boot as a mountable firewire harddrive, switch off to exit
X : forces OS X boot when OS 9 installed
CMD-S : Single User mode
CMD-V : Verbose Mode just like linux
Shift : Safe mode
Option : Load Startup manager
Mouse Button : Eject Disc

Make bash your default shell

For some reason in screen on my ubuntu mini-itx machine when I create new terminals the shell just defaults to sh. so I have been trying to make it go straight to bash.

The following command should make bash the default shell
chsh -s /bin/bash username

VLC Now works on OS X 10.5.4

VLC, My favorite media player for the Mac now works correctly on OS X 10.5.4.

Bugs I have seen fixed are:
Full screen now exits correctly. Instead of getting locked out in the spaces layer.
When in Full Screen mode Expose and spaces work

latest version VLC 0.8.6i

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Inverting Screen Colours OS X

I often get saw eyes when reading web pages in low light on my macbook, so I find this keyboard short cut very useful.
ctrl-alt-cmd-8
Which inverts the colours. White text on a black back ground is much easier on the eyes, and since there is less light comming off the screen your eyes can adjust better to see the keyboard.

Screen CTRL-S Bug

When switching between terminals and text editors the occasional ctrl-s gets accidentally typed into the terminal. For along time I thought that this was a bug in screen but it is a standard terminal feature. Ctrl-s calls the software flow control method XOFF which stops the character flow to the terminal, which when you did not realise what you pressed just seems to freeze the terminal.

ctrl-q calls XON and starts the terminal again.

For a more permanent fix you can add this to your .bashrc (not sure how other shells are effected).

stty ixany

Which allows any character to call XON, so the character press is sent and displayed and you will never be aware of the terminal freezing.

If this does not work for you, or you also don't seem to be able to send ctrl-s ctrl-q commands to terminal applications you can use
stty stop undef To unmap ctrl-s
stty start undef To unmap ctrl-q

Or to stop XOFF and XON being sent from the keyboard but still allowing other software to send the commands use
stty ixoff -ixon
NB: ctrl-q can now be used to shutdown rtorrent