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 ...

In honor of Mexico’s victory over the forces of Napolean III only 153 years ago, today’s post is going to cover five unusual Unix commands that maybe even you have never used. These include ddate, ...

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.

A couple of days ago we discussed some problems that could arise with sizing files with HFS compression. This problem basically arises from there being a lack of consistency in the various utilities ...

Today’s hint will probably only appeal to those of you learning to use the Unix side of OS X. A while back, I was trying to capture the ouput of the Unix command httpd -t (which runs a syntax check on ...

Before we even get started with this topic, let me acknowledge all of you readers out there who are wondering why I didn’t call this week’s column “Shoving Technology Backwards”. Granted, few of us ...

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 ...

If you've used the command line in Linux or a Unix-based platform like macOS, you're probably familiar with the "sudo" command -- it lets you run tasks with different (usually elevated) permissions ...

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.