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, ...

Two weeks ago, in this column, we looked at some macros and DOS commands that can make your time at the DOS command prompt more like the Unix environment that most of us know and love. In this week’s ...

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 ...

Maybe WSL did it better all along.

Last week’s column introduced NTP, the Network Time Protocol and the concept of highly accurate timekeeping. While numerous commands exist to help system administrators maintain fairly accurate time ...

Secure Copy is a UNIX standard used to transfer files from one computer to another. He's how to use the function in macOS, all via the Terminal window. Before personal computers, there were mainframe ...

For decades, Coreutils have been part of the standard repertoire for Linux administrators and developers. Those who wanted to use these tools on Windows with largely identical behavior previously ...