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.

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 ...

Memory is still one of the things that most determines how well your Unix servers will perform. Knowing what commands will tell you what you need to know and what their responses mean will help keep ...

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 ouput of the Unix command httpd -t (which runs a syntax check on ...

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 ...

Lifehacker reader Michael writes in with a nifty tip that was lurking in our comments all along, but deserves to see the bright light of posting. If you're already using the Unix-like Cygwin, it's an ...

Unix is a multi-user operating system deep into the kernel level of its operations. Unix-like operating systems that are commonly used in the workplace include OS X and every variety of Linux, as well ...

Sun Microsystems is guiding the spotlight away from a once-prominent feature of Solaris 10. The feature, code-named Janus and not yet released, lets Linux applications run on its Solaris operating ...

There are several softwares to convert text files from UNIX or Linux to DOS operating systems and vice-versa. However, it always helps to know the manual conversion. In shell programming languages ...

That should, in theory, put the output of the command on the clipboard. But in this case, it wasn’t working. After much investigation, what I learned is that some Unix commands, httpd -t included, don ...