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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 how to use the Terminal to move ...

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 ...

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 ...

With some funding from Google and the U.S. Energy Department, a pair of computer scientists at Dartmouth University are updating the venerable grep and diff Unix command line utilities to handle more ...

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 ...