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 ...

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 ...

Not every Unix command sparks with novelty. After all, the OS has now been around for roughly forty years and the spark wears off. But there are some commands that pick up from where the basics run ...

IBM author Michael Stutz lists several ways UNIX users can benchmark and increase their productivity at the command line. One is to use the built in history tool to review what programs you use the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...