Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs ...

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 ...

It’s easy to take the Unix command line for granted. That is, it’s easy to get used to typing in commands and getting responses without thinking very much about how the system determines what command ...

The UNIX ping command lets you test network servers and latency. Here's how to use it in the macOS Terminal app. The UNIX ping command is a tiny UNIX network tool that allows you to test your network, ...

The Terminal app in macOS keeps track of recent commands you've used so you can reuse them at a later time. Here's how to clear Terminal's command history. When you type commands and press return in ...

If you’re a Unix admin, it helps to know how password aging is managed and how you can determine when a password was last changed or force a change in the near future. The key to understanding how ...

If you've used the command line in Linux or a Unix-based platform like macOS, you're probably familiar with the "sudo" command -- it lets you run tasks with different (usually elevated) permissions ...

It’s been nearly 20 years since I first came across the Useless Use of Cat (UUOC) awards. Unix notable and Perl disciple Randall Schwartz had begun handing out these embarrassing awards around 1995 to ...

Ever wish you could take a look at the device aliases on a Solaris system without having to descend all the way down to the ok prompt? Well, you can. By issuing the proper version of the prtconf ...

Columnist Dave Taylor reminisces about the early days of UNIX and how Linux evolved and grew from that seed. Twenty five years of Linux Journal. This also marks my 161st column with the magazine too, ...