One of the questions that Unix users are sometimes reluctant to ask is how all the directory names — like /etc, /var and /usr/local — came about in the first place. Why did we adopt the particular ...

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 ...

The Unix operating system is one of computing's most significant technologies, providing the framework that the familiar Linux and Mac OS X operating systems were developed on. Unix can be a viable ...

Different implementations of UNIX have historically shown some of their differences by the way they located important files. If a file in this list, particularly a system file, does not appear in the ...

While the average Unix user is generally satisfied by the date/time stamps that he sees when using the ls -l command, it is sometimes useful to remember that there are actually several time stamps ...

A heritage of dumb terminals and 1980s workstations still leaves Linux rooted in text tools and unconventional window ...

You have thousands of commands at your disposal as a Unix administrator. However, even the most advanced administrators only use a finite number of tools and utilities on an ongoing basis. The ...

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 ...

What are these weird directories, and why are they there? If you are new to the Linux command line, you may find yourself wondering why there are so many unusual directories, what they are there for, ...