After two and a half decades of working with Unix, I’ve seen a lot of change in my favorite OS and, at the same time, retained a number of favorite commands that continue to keep my job as a Unix ...

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 ...

The OS X Terminal opens up a world of powerful UNIX utilities and scripts. If you're migrating from Linux, you'll find many familiar commands work the way you expect. But power users often aren't ...

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.

If you ever find yourself cutting and pasting Unix commands and their output into a file in order to create a record of some anomaly you have encountered on a system you manage or to document a ...

An associative array is an array which uses strings as indices instead of integers. To see how associative arrays work, we’re going to look at both the Korn shell and Perl, though only the newest ...

One particular frustration with the UNIX shell is the inability to easily schedule multiple, concurrent tasks that fully utilize CPU cores presented on modern systems. The example of focus in this ...

Minix, the Unix operating system that inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux, has been expanded to give users a wider range of commands and features, thanks in large part to a Google Summer of Code ...

The Terminal app in macOS keeps track of recent commands you've used so you can reuse them at a later time. Here's how to clear Terminal's command history. When you type commands and press return in ...