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Engineering craft

macOS

Mac power-user skills.

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  • 01·150 XP
    Sudo & Root
    uid 0, the admin group, and the precedence rules that trip everyone up.
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  • 02·150 XP
    Encrypted Volumes
    FileVault, APFS volumes, encrypted DMGs, and encrypted externals — which protects what.
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  • 03·150 XP
    Keychain & the security CLI
    How to store and fetch secrets from the login keychain from a script.
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  • 04·150 XP
    launchd
    How Mac jobs actually run: plists, agents, daemons, and why cron is gone.
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  • 05·150 XP
    Gatekeeper & Quarantine
    xattr com.apple.quarantine, notarization, and how macOS decides whether to run your download.
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  • 06·150 XP
    defaults & plists
    Tweaking macOS through the preference database — and reloading so it sticks.
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  • 07·150 XP
    Spotlight & mdfind
    Querying the Spotlight index from the terminal — kMDItem attributes, exclusions, volume indexing.
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  • 08·175 XP
    Network Tools
    airport, networksetup, scutil, route — the macOS networking CLI and where it diverges from Linux.
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  • 09·175 XP
    Debugging with leaks & Instruments
    leaks, vmmap, sample, spindump, and Instruments.app — when to reach for which.
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