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 ...

Click to viewThat Mac you're viewing this web page on using a pretty graphical interface? That's a Unix-based system which can run the powerful and age old command line utilities of the most advanced ...

Every month or two, someone asks me how they should go about learning Unix. The short answer is always “use it” or maybe as much as “use it — a lot.” But the detailed answer includes a lot of steps ...

In the previous two installments in this series, we looked at the basics of using the Terminal to access the Unix command line at the heart of Mac OS X, and then at ...

Wow. It’s amazing we ever made it out of the 20th century. It’s like reading about farmers who would plow by hand. I remember the epiphany (long time ago) of discovering how awk solved my problem of ...

A firmware password secures a system against unauthorized changes at the ok prompt. If you don’t have a firmware password set, anyone with access to your system’s console can modify your OpenBoot ...

A text-based user interface to the computer. The command line is a blank line and cursor on the screen, allowing the user to type in instructions for immediate execution. All major operating systems ...