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.

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 ...

If you haven’t yet discovered the versatile curl, you might just be surprised by how clever a tool it is. curl, or cURL, is a lot more than a drop-in replacement for wget. Although either tool can be ...

A lot of information is available about individual files on a Unix system. For example, the ls -l command will display the permissions matrix and ls -i will display a file’s inode. But, if we want to ...

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 ...

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 ...