Bitcoin-Qt command line control on Mac
You can start it from the command-line using:

open Bitcoin-Qt.app --args -server


I think the --args option to open is OSX 10.6 and later; if you are running an older OSX put server=1 in your ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/bitcoin.conf file. In fact, to use the -server command you must set a -rpcuser/-rpcpassword, so I'd suggest creating a bitcoin.conf that contains:

server=1
rpcuser=yourname
rpcpassword=...something else


We don't ship a bitcoind for the Mac, but you can use curl (for example) to send commands to the running Bitcoin-Qt:

curl --user yourname --data-binary '{"id":"t0", "method": "getinfo", "params": [] }' http://127.0.0.1:8332/


The bitcoin source tree also contains python code that uses the free 'jsonrpc' library to communicate with a running Bitcoin-Qt (see contrib/bitrpc/).