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 ...

One of the questions that Unix users are sometimes reluctant to ask is how all the directory names — like /etc, /var and /usr/local — came about in the first place. Why did we adopt the particular ...

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 ...

is the name of a UNIX command, executable program, or shell script to which you want to route output or from which you want to read input. The command(s) must be enclosed in either double or single ...

If you're new to the UNIX operating system, especially if you're familiar with Windows, you'll find that the file access control mechanisms might not be exactly what you expect. File permissions and ...

The only thing that’s really hard about extracting from archives on Unix systems is remembering all of the commands and the required options. When you have ten or more possible archive types and could ...

A couple of days ago we discussed some problems that could arise with sizing files with HFS compression. This problem basically arises from there being a lack of consistency in the various utilities ...

Maybe you're married to Microsoft Exchange, but you secretly pine for open-source e-mail tools like SpamAssassin or fetchmail. Or maybe you're using Unix-based applications for some network services, ...