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 ...

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 ...

Use these Linux commands to quickly search and find anything from the Linux terminal, without digging through folders in a GUI file manager.

The diff, comm, cmp, and colordiff commands are among the many ways to compare text files on a Linux system. There are numerous ways to compare text files on a Linux system from the command line. This ...