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 ...

Commands that provide help are essential. Here's a look at some of the help you can get from the Linux system itself. Even after you’ve used Linux for a while, you will still find yourself needing ...

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.

As Terry Lambert, the developer behind Linux ancestor Unix, once said, "It is not Unix's job to stop you from shooting your foot. If you so choose to do so, then it is Unix's job to deliver Mr. Bullet ...

You can use the stat command to view dates and times associated with Linux files, and the date command can do some handy conversions if you’d like to display the current time in the epoch format.

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 ...

There are several softwares to convert text files from UNIX or Linux to DOS operating systems and vice-versa. However, it always helps to know the manual conversion. In shell programming languages ...

The 'sudo' keyword in Unix and Linux allows users to execute certain commands with special-access privileges that cannot otherwise run on a given machine by a user with a lower level of clearance.

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 ...