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.

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 ...

Delete Backs up to erase one character. Backspace Mapped as a backspace key, displaying ^H. Ctrl-u Erases the command line. Ctrl-w Erases the last word on the command line. Ctrl-s Stops flow of output ...

Today’s hint will probably only appeal to those of you learning to use the Unix side of OS X. A while back, I was trying to capture the output of the Unix command httpd -t (which runs a syntax check ...

IBM author Michael Stutz lists several ways UNIX users can benchmark and increase their productivity at the command line. One is to use the built in history tool to review what programs you use the ...

Clearly one of the best features of disk arrays is that they can continue working even when a disk has failed. One of the problems, however, is that you might not notice when a disk fails, and thus, ...

UNIX-based operating systems have man pages that describe how to use commands and functions, and the contents of the man pages can be viewed using the man command ( mandb). This man command had an ...