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.

You can make your life a little easier and more productive by adding some Unix power to your Windows system. For a fairly extensive collection of Unix tools — including most of the essentials like ...

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 default behavior of ping on Linux and other Unix-like systems is different from Windows. On Windows, the ping command ...

The fuser (pronounced “ef-user”) command is a very handy command for determining who is currently using a particular file or directory. If one user can’t access a file because another user has it ...

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 ...

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 ...