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 ...

Underneath its candy-coated Aqua interface, Mac OS X is based on Unix, an operating system that dates back to 1969. Unix and its archetypal user interface, the command line, look alien to many Mac ...

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.

If you use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, ...

The tools Linux developers love are coming to Windows.

The use of the Linux operating system is becoming more common throughout the IT industry. Many corporate IT departments are using Linux to complement existing Unix systems using special-purpose Linux ...

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 ...