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.

When Apple announced the release of Mac OS X, many Mac users were stunned: here was a new operating system based on the venerable Unix, which, they feared, would call into question the Mac’s legendary ...

One of the problems that seems to plague nearly all file systems — Unix and others — is the continuous buildup of files. Almost no one takes the time to clean out files that they no longer use and ...

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 ...

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 ...

Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs ...

When one of only a handful of Windows servers that I manage dropped off my radar for a while, I wasn’t sure what to think. I had been running an application, for which this system was the server and ...

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 ...

Command-line Perl scripts can make adminstering a UNIX box easier by replacing certain commands with some routine scripts. Find out how to take advantage of this approach. Perl is everywhere. Most ...