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 ...

Ever wondered why programming in Bash is so difficult? Bash employs the same constructs as traditional programming languages; however, under the hood, the logic is rather different. The Bourne-Again ...

This Wiley Publishing tome is big (more than 650 pages), useful and very complete. Be warned, however, that its scope is limited to system administration. The purpose of the book is to solve “real ...

Attaching a remote drive or directory on a Windows box is called “drive mapping” though the process is essentially the same as what we call mounting in the Unix world. While I rarely spend any ...

Simply put, environment variables are variables that are set up in your shell when you log in. They are called “environment variables” because most of them affect the way your Unix shell works for you ...

I'm a complete UNIX newbie, so please forgive the question. Is there a UNIX shell command that will rename all the files in a directory to something like "file1.txt", "file2.txt", etc? I don't need to ...

As Terry Lambert, the developer behind Linux ancestor Unix, once said, "It is not Unix's job to stop you from shooting your foot. If you so choose to do so, then it is Unix's job to deliver Mr. Bullet ...