One of the files that the average Unix sysadmin rarely looks at, almost never changes and yet depends on every time he or she reboots a system is the /etc/inittab file. This modest little file ...

Learn what .pacnew files are in Arch Linux, why pacman creates the pacnew files, and how to safely merge or replace them ...

Sure, using the Linux command line is optional. But these are commands I depend on every day. See what you think.

The which command will show you the file-system location for a command’s executable. This is the file that is read and run whenever you type the command name. In the example below, there are two or ...

On Linux, the umask defines how new files and directories inherit access rights. Linux uses your current umask value to ...

The tree command is perfect for viewing your entire directory structure at a glance. It shows folders and files in a clear, ...

For those new to Linux, you might be a bit concerned about learning the command line. After all, you probably come from a platform that uses a GUI for nearly every task and haven’t spent much time ...

An operating system's kernel manages resources, handles system calls, governs hardware access, and controls processes. The ...

When Apple was about to introduce Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard, John Siracusa wrote in the summer of 2006 about how a new file system should be coming to Macs (which it did, 11 years later). The ...

Learn how to append text to files in Linux using commands like double redirection operator, tee, and sed without overwriting existing data.

Back in the early days of Linux, things were exponentially more complicated. The distributions were far less mature and required a particular system account to get things done. That account was root - ...