Jason Hiner/ZDNETBecause I’ve been using Linux for such a long time, the command line is second nature to me. I know which commands I need in order to do certain things — and they never fail. That’s one of the reasons why I decided using the command line in MacOS made sense too. After all, the MacOS and Linux CLI (command-line interface) are quite similar.Also: How to format USB drives on Linux, MacOS, and WindowsBut if you’re new to the practice of running commands, you probably have no idea where to start. That’s where I come in. Allow me to introduce you to five commands that not only will serve you well but aren’t even remotely hard to use. And with that, let’s dive into the commands. 1. Available free space When you want to find out how much space is left on your hard drive (or multiple drives, if you have them attached), you could always go to System Settings, search for Storage, and then allow the GUI to calculate the available free space. Or, you could open the terminal app and issue a single command that will display how much free space is available on all attached drives. The command in question is df, which displays free disk space. You can view the free space on all of your drives by issuing the command like this: My favorite way of using df is in human-readable format. When you use df without options, it will display the results in blocks, which can be very confusing. Instead, use the command: This will present the output in GB, which is much easier to understand. 2. Killing a rogue app It might be a rare occasion, but sometimes an app goes rogue and refuses to close. Sure, you could always use the Force Quit tool (from the Apple menu in the top bar). Or, you could use the kill command. I’ve had one instance where the MacOS GUI refused to respond. Instead of doing a hard restart, I used SSH to log into the machine, locate the problematic app, kill it from the command line, and my GUI came back to me. Also: This app makes using Ollama local AI on MacOS devices so easyBefore you can kill the app, however, you must first locate its PID (process ID). To do that, issue the command: ps aux | grep NAMEWhere NAME is the name of the app (such as Safari). Once you have the PID, you can kill the rogue app with the command: More