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 ...

Every month or two, someone asks me how they should go about learning Unix. The short answer is always “use it” or maybe as much as “use it — a lot.” But the detailed answer includes a lot of steps ...

Command-line Perl scripts can make adminstering a UNIX box easier by replacing certain commands with some routine scripts. Find out how to take advantage of this approach. Perl is everywhere. Most ...

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.

Microsoft built a Linux subsystem for Windows for Project Astoria, its system for running Android apps on Windows 10 Mobile. But in February the company confirmed that Astoria was dead, as it rather ...

Cron is nice and all, but don't forget about its cousin at. When I first started using Linux, it was like being tossed into the deep end of the UNIX pool. You were expected to use the command line ...

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 ...

A firmware password secures a system against unauthorized changes at the ok prompt. If you don’t have a firmware password set, anyone with access to your system’s console can modify your OpenBoot ...

Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs ...

A text-based user interface to the computer. The command line is a blank line and cursor on the screen, allowing the user to type in instructions for immediate execution. All major operating systems ...