GUIs are great—we wouldn’t want to live without them. But if you’re a Mac or Linux user and you want to get the most out of your operating system (and your keystrokes), you owe it to yourself to get ...

I wrote a small Unix shell in C.How are commands like `ls` and `cat`, which we use casually in the terminal, actually ...

Unix was developed as a command line interface in the early 1970s with a very rich command vocabulary. DOS followed more than a decade later for the IBM PC, and DOS commands migrated to Windows.

Many Linux commands we still use every day originated with Version 1 Unix, all the way back in 1971. Some still outperform their modern equivalents, either in pure processing speed or in other ...

This chapter excerpt on Linux Administration (download PDF) is taken from the book The Accidental Administrator: Linux Server Step-by-Step Configuration Guide. Among the topics covered in this book ...

Log files on Unix systems can easily grow to hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines. Here's a simple way to pluck out every Nth line. Head and tail are great commands when you want to look ...

If you are used to the Unix command line, then you will find yourself right at home with Apple’s Terminal application in OS X. The tool launches bash as the default shell for user accounts, but you ...

Using UNIX in a day-to-day office setting doesn't have to be clumsy. Learn some of the many ways, both simple and complex, to use the power of the UNIX shell and available system tools to greatly ...

Cron is nice and all, but don't forget about its cousin at. When I first started using Linux, it was like being tossed into the deep end of the UNIX pool. You were expected to use the command line ...

A firmware password secures a system against unauthorized changes at the ok prompt. If you don’t have a firmware password set, anyone with access to your system’s console can modify your OpenBoot ...

A text-based user interface to the computer. The command line is a blank line and cursor on the screen, allowing the user to type in instructions for immediate execution. All major operating systems ...