The head, tail and more commands are among the first ten or twenty commands that most beginning Unix users are going to learn. A far more intriguing command for many of the tasks they will end up ...

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 ...

If you use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, ...

Underneath its candy-coated Aqua interface, Mac OS X is based on Unix, an operating system that dates back to 1969. Unix and its archetypal user interface, the command line, look alien to many Mac ...

Simply put, environment variables are variables that are set up in your shell when you log in. They are called “environment variables” because most of them affect the way your Unix shell works for you ...

ITworld.com – Ok, well maybe the subject line of this column is stretching it just a wee bit. There’s no way that you can emulate more than a small fraction of Unix power at the DOS Command Prompt.

People who have had bad experiences on Windows disks that performed poorly after they had become very fragmented often wonder if they need to apply some kind of periodic analysis and defragmentation ...