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 ...

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.

You can make your life a little easier and more productive by adding some Unix power to your Windows system. For a fairly extensive collection of Unix tools — including most of the essentials like ...

Last week’s column introduced NTP, the Network Time Protocol and the concept of highly accurate timekeeping. While numerous commands exist to help system administrators maintain fairly accurate time ...

The default behavior of ping on Linux and other Unix-like systems is different from Windows. On Windows, the ping command ...

If you are starting to experiment with the OS X Terminal, you'll want to know what commands are available. Here are some ways to explore your options. Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, ...

Command-line Perl scripts can make adminstering a UNIX box easier by replacing certain commands with some routine scripts. Find out how to take advantage of this approach. Perl is everywhere. Most ...

Mac OS X 10.5 includes a number of changes to its Unix core, perhaps more than in any prior OS X release. Many of the changes are routine—updated versions of key Unix programs such as the bash shell ...