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.

You can make your life a little easier and more productive by adding some Unix power to your Windows system. For a fairly extensive collection of Unix tools — including most of the essentials like ...

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 ...

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 ...

In a program I am writing (unix/linux system), I would like to perform some commands such as "cd", "find", etc.. How can I do this? Is this something I would use exec for? Or is there an easier way to ...

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 ...

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.

In a typical work week, a Unix systems administrator is likely to have at least one small mystery to solve — one “huh?”, one “that doesn’t make any sense” or one “I’ve never seen this before”. Most of ...