How to list all “Terminal” Commands on MacOS Sierra?

Have you ever wanted to know what every single possible terminal command was on a Mac?

You can list every terminal command available by turning to the command line.

What you’ll see is a significant list of terminal commands with over 1400 possible commands to investigate and use, many of which are either helpful or powerful as we regularly cover with our command line guides.

Use the following steps to know all the commands of your Mac.

Step 1 : Open “Terminal”, just search for it using the search box and it will show up to you

Once you open terminal, press the “Esc” button 2 or 3 times quickly and the terminal will ask “Display all 1453 possibilities?” like the picture below:

Press “y” and hit enter, and you will see a list of commands just like below

if you press the “Backspace” key, it will end the command list.

You’ll see a truly exhaustive list of commands available, some of which may be familiar to advanced users and many commands which even pro users likely have never seen or used before.

Of course you’re now probably wondering what each command might do, or how to investigate what the shown commands do. That’s easy as well, and let’s find out what the action of every command

1. To know what it does and what is for, right click on any command, and click “Open man page” just like below.

2. Once you click “Open man page” it will display the manual of the selected commands just like below

You can also use the Terminal app “Help” menu to quickly launch manual pages by searching for a specific command there.