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 ...

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.

User profiles aren’t restricted to what shells your users use, what groups they are members of, and what privileges they have been allocated. While these factors are important, so are when they log in ...

Terminal provides a command line interface to control the UNIX-based operating system that lurks below macOS (or Mac OS X). Here’s everything you need to know about Terminal, and what it can do for ...

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 ...

The Terminal app in macOS keeps track of recent commands you've used so you can reuse them at a later time. Here's how to clear Terminal's command history. When you type commands and press return in ...

I have several folders with hundreds of nested sub-folders and tens of thousnnds of nested files even deeper inside. I want to get an estimated count of how many files are really there. What is the ...

The 'sudo' keyword in Unix and Linux allows users to execute certain commands with special-access privileges that cannot otherwise run on a given machine by a user with a lower level of clearance.

Ever wondered why programming in Bash is so difficult? Bash employs the same constructs as traditional programming languages; however, under the hood, the logic is rather different. The Bourne-Again ...

Delete Backs up to erase one character. Backspace Mapped as a backspace key, displaying ^H. Ctrl-u Erases the command line. Ctrl-w Erases the last word on the command line. Ctrl-s Stops flow of output ...