Say – a cool terminal command

Nov 2006

Another jaw-dropping feature of Mac OS X when showing off to your friends – open the Terminal (~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal ) and type say command, followed by any text.

For example type: say I like silvermac and press return. Your computer promptly does what you asked it do do, it says I like silvermac.

[tags]OSX, terminal, cool, say[/tags]

Mac

Comments

iTux

November 26th, 2006 at 10:46 PM

Some commands to show off:

uname -a | say

uptime | say

Have fun! :D
Brian

November 27th, 2006 at 3:24 AM

Nice! I’ve only had my macbook pro for a couple weeks. But each day I find out something I couldn’t do in windows very easily. Mac forever!
Mailman

December 30th, 2006 at 12:20 PM

Basicly… ‘echo’ with minus one letter.
jesus

April 2nd, 2007 at 1:07 PM

@Mailman: I do not have a Mac, so I cannot test this, but I think by “say”, they mean the computer physically puts the text in to speech (as OS X does have builh in text-to-speech support), and “says” it, through speakers. I do have a PC running Windows, though, and all “echo” does, is repeat back what you tell it to – in text.
andrewman

October 20th, 2007 at 8:18 AM

you can also do this in script editor.

type:

say “words”

and press compile button at top then run, you can also tell it to beep,

beep 3

tells it to beep 3 times, you can change the beep in:

system prefrences/sound/sound effects