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 ...

Are you someone who never met a Unix command you didn't like? OK, maybe not. But are there commands you just can't imagine living without? Let's look at some that have made a big difference on my ...

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 use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Cron is nice and all, but don't forget about its cousin at. When I first started using Linux, it was like being tossed into the deep end of the UNIX pool. You were expected to use the command line ...

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 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 ...