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4 Built-In macOS Commands That Replace Software You Didn’t Need to Install
No Homebrew, no App Store. Resize Images, Build Disk Images, Generate Thumbnails, and Check Backups — All with Commands Already on Your Mac.
I had forty screenshots to resize for a blog post, and my hand was already typing brew install imagemagick before I caught myself.
Forty. Not four. My cursor was two keystrokes from pulling in a dependency to shrink some PNGs.
Then I remembered: macOS has shipped an image tool since Mac OS X Panther, back in 2003. It’s called sips. It's been sitting in /usr/bin the entire time, ignored, because nobody reads the man page for a tool they've never heard of.
That wasn’t a one-off. I looked at how much software I could skip installing by using what’s already on the machine, and landed on four commands: sips, hdiutil, qlmanage, and tmutil. I ran every one of them for real, on a real Mac, and recorded the terminal output. Not screenshots stitched together afterward. Actual sessions, start to finish.
