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 ...

Click to viewThat Mac you're viewing this web page on using a pretty graphical interface? That's a Unix-based system which can run the powerful and age old command line utilities of the most advanced ...

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 ...

In the previous two installments in this series, we looked at the basics of using the Terminal to access the Unix command line at the heart of Mac OS X, and then at ...

Lifehacker reader Michael writes in with a nifty tip that was lurking in our comments all along, but deserves to see the bright light of posting. If you're already using the Unix-like Cygwin, it's an ...

It’s easy to take the Unix command line for granted. That is, it’s easy to get used to typing in commands and getting responses without thinking very much about how the system determines what command ...

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 ...