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 ...

It’s easy to take the Unix command line for granted. That is, it’s easy to get used to typing in commands and getting responses without thinking very much about how the system determines what command ...

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 ...

When you enter commands in the Terminal, they are saved in a history that you can scroll through by pressing the up and down arrows. This tip prevents the same item from being saved to the history ...

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 ...

A customer account with an Internet service provider (ISP) that requires the user to enter Unix commands to send and receive mail and files. Prior to today's graphical interfaces, Internet access was ...