You have thousands of commands at your disposal as a Unix administrator. However, even the most advanced administrators only use a finite number of tools and utilities on an ongoing basis. The ...

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 ...

There are several ways to conveniently generate random data on Unix systems. One popular way is to make use of Perl’s rand function. Another is to employ the /dev/random or /dev/urandom pseudodevice ...

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.

Older commands can still be faster—and more flexible, powerful, and accessible too!

This chapter excerpt on Linux Administration (download PDF) is taken from the book The Accidental Administrator: Linux Server Step-by-Step Configuration Guide. Among the topics covered in this book ...

In last week’s column, I encouraged anyone who hasn’t already patched their OSes for the imminent daylight savings time changes. This week, we look at a command for displaying timezone data and ...

User profiles aren’t restricted to what shells your users use, what groups they are members of, and what privileges they have been allocated. While these factors are important, so are when they log in ...