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 ...

One of the ways to determine how useful a directory and its contents are or to produce a summary that gives you a sense of what the contents are about is to collect statistics on the number of files, ...

Delete Backs up to erase one character. Backspace Mapped as a backspace key, displaying ^H. Ctrl-u Erases the command line. Ctrl-w Erases the last word on the command line. Ctrl-s Stops flow of output ...

is the name of a UNIX command, executable program, or shell script to which you want to route output or from which you want to read input. The command(s) must be enclosed in either double or single ...

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 ...

Secure Copy is a UNIX standard used to transfer files from one computer to another. He's how to use the function in macOS, all via the Terminal window. Before personal computers, there were mainframe ...

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.