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 ...

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 ...

One of the ways to determine how useful a directory and its contents are or to produce a summary that gives you a sense of what the contents are about is to collect statistics on the number of files, ...

If you've got a smartphone in your pocket, chances are you've got a digital assistant in there too (or you will very soon). For all her smarts, though, Siri can't help much when you hunker down in ...

Mac OS X 10.5 includes a number of changes to its Unix core, perhaps more than in any prior OS X release. Many of the changes are routine—updated versions of key Unix programs such as the bash shell ...

Click to viewThat Mac you're viewing this web page on using a pretty graphical interface? That's a Unix-based system which can run the powerful and age old command line utilities of the most advanced ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...