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 ...

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.

Unix systems provide numerous ways to compare files. The most common way to verify that you have received or downloaded the proper file is to compute a checksum and compare it against one computed by ...

People who have had bad experiences on Windows disks that performed poorly after they had become very fragmented often wonder if they need to apply some kind of periodic analysis and defragmentation ...

Businesses have proprietary information such as customer lists that need protection. The easiest way to protect only a few critical files is to encrypt and decrypt them manually. Unix system come with ...

Wired's newly-revamped Webmonkey site has an informative guide on seeing, changing, and understanding file permissions in Unix-like systems. These are the kind of operations and syntax that can often ...

The ZIP archive is recognized by most operating systems, thus making it useful for compressing and archiving files regardless of the OS that your employees or customers use. If your company uses one ...

There are a number of tricks that you can implement on a Unix system to lessen the chance that you will accidentally erase important files. The two that we’ll examine will 1) help protect files in an ...