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In addition to those on its well-known list of 200+ new features, OS X Mountain Lion also brings along a handful of new UNIX commands and binaries. Most are probably outside the scope of Ask Different (e.g. commands concerning Radius Authentication, Kerberos or Berkeley DB maintainance) but some of them may prove valuable to (aspiring) power users out there. As always, you will find more information in the corresponding man pages.

Administrator commands (/usr/sbin)

sharing – create share points for afp, ftp and smb services

This is a great addition to the UNIX shell level: a tool to create, modify and delete share points (aka shared directories). In its most basic form it can be used like this to add a share for a specific directory on afp, ftp and smb/Samba:

sudo sharing -a /Users/bob/bobs-toolbox

To turn off guest access to the newly-created share, use

sudo sharing -e /Users/bob/bobs-toolbox -g 000

Removing the share entirely is as easy as

sudo sharing -r /Users/bob/bobs-toolbox

In addition, sharing allows for individual names and access rights for all three sharing protocols and access to protocol-specific details.

The only drawback is that the command must always be run as root, but that’s probably only a minor issue for most users and uses.

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