Today's IBM mainframe represents the continuation of a computing revolution that began with the application of ideas from the 1877 Jacquard loom to the 1890 US census. That evolution has focused on ...

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.

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 ...

To get started as a Linux (or Unix) user, you need to have a good perspective on how Linux works and a handle on some of the most basic commands. This first post in a “getting started” series examines ...

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 ...

A lot of information is available about individual files on a Unix system. For example, the ls -l command will display the permissions matrix and ls -i will display a file’s inode. But, if we want to ...

Maybe you're married to Microsoft Exchange, but you secretly pine for open-source e-mail tools like SpamAssassin or fetchmail. Or maybe you're using Unix-based applications for some network services, ...

In the world of Unix-based operating systems like Linux, file packaging and compression utilities play a pivotal role. One such utility is the zip command, an effective tool for compressing files to ...

The command-line interface of your Mac lets you get into the Unix underpinning that makes Macs so powerful. Learn the top commands everyone should know to be a Mac power user. Over the years, the Mac ...