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 ...

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.

If you are used to the Unix command line, then you will find yourself right at home with Apple’s Terminal application in OS X. The tool launches bash as the default shell for user accounts, but you ...

If you use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...