Ever wondered why programming in Bash is so difficult? Bash employs the same constructs as traditional programming languages; however, under the hood, the logic is rather different. The Bourne-Again ...

This Wiley Publishing tome is big (more than 650 pages), useful and very complete. Be warned, however, that its scope is limited to system administration. The purpose of the book is to solve “real ...

I recently switched to Mac OS X as my primary desktop operating system after spending over a decade on Linux. Although Apple’s operating system supplies practically all of the command line tools I ...

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 ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

Bash, aka the Bourne-Again Shell, has a newly discovered security hole. And, for many Unix or Linux Web servers, it's a major problem. The flaw involves how Bash evaluates environment variables. With ...

In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer at AT&T subsidiary Bell Laboratories, saw the month-long departure of his wife and young son as an opportunity to put his ideas for a new operating system ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...