One of the questions that Unix users are sometimes reluctant to ask is how all the directory names — like /etc, /var and /usr/local — came about in the first place. Why did we adopt the particular ...

People who have had bad experiences on Windows disks that performed poorly after they had become very fragmented often wonder if they need to apply some kind of periodic analysis and defragmentation ...

This November, the Unix community has another notable anniversary to celebrate: the 40th birthday of the first edition of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie’s Unix Programmers Manual, released in ...

A fascinating little point made in a much longer piece about the smartphone wars. One that makes me wonder whether Unix can now be considered to be the most successful operating system of all time.

The Unix operating system is one of computing's most significant technologies, providing the framework that the familiar Linux and Mac OS X operating systems were developed on. Unix can be a viable ...

TeraFile, a UNIX file-system module that breaks the two GB file-size barrier, is now available. TeraFile provides 64-bit file access for existing 32-bit UNIX operating systems. Files can grow beyond ...

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 a number of tricks that you can implement on a Unix system to lessen the chance that you will accidentally erase important files. The two that we’ll examine will 1) help protect files in an ...