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 ...

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 ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

I booted UNIX V4 (first C rewrite) in a PDP‑11 emulator. It feels tactile—no backspace, staggered print, slower typing, and it forced me to slow down. Classic Unix tools (ls, cat, ed, cal, dc) and ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...