This "modern" OS is based on ideas over 50 years old.

I've often extolled the philosophy of Unix, and as the title implies, I'm not about to stop. Before I learned computer science, I thought all computers were impenetrably arcane. But when I grasped ...

How to develop command-line utilities in Rust. This article demonstrates how to perform basic file and file I/O operations in Rust, and also introduces Rust's ownership concept and the Cargo tool. If ...

Notepad, the text editor that ships with Windows, is not a complicated application. For many, this is its major advantage—by having virtually no features, it cannot go wrong—but especially for ...

If you have ever copied or opened a Unix file in the Windows Notepad, you would have seen that the result is very ugly as all of the text appears as a mess on one line as Notepad does not recognize ...

Simply put, environment variables are variables that are set up in your shell when you log in. They are called “environment variables” because most of them affect the way your Unix shell works for you ...

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 ...

Other than having to switch between “/” and “” when I’m moving from Unix systems to Windows systems, one of the most annoying (and seemingly pointless) differences is the way that these two competing ...

The ZIP archive is recognized by most operating systems, thus making it useful for compressing and archiving files regardless of the OS that your employees or customers use. If your company uses one ...

Businesses have proprietary information such as customer lists that need protection. The easiest way to protect only a few critical files is to encrypt and decrypt them manually. Unix system come with ...

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 ...