Part 1: Implementing the 'uniq' command. 'uniq' is a Unix utility which, when fed a text file, outputs the file with adjacent identical lines collapsed to one. If a filename is provided on the command ...

K THOMPSON has a BS and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (1965 and 1966 respectively). He has been a member of the Technical Staff in the Computing Science ...

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 ...

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 ...

The only thing that’s really hard about extracting from archives on Unix systems is remembering all of the commands and the required options. When you have ten or more possible archive types and could ...

A lot of information is available about individual files on a Unix system. For example, the ls -l command will display the permissions matrix and ls -i will display a file’s inode. But, if we want to ...

Not every Unix command sparks with novelty. After all, the OS has now been around for roughly forty years and the spark wears off. But there are some commands that pick up from where the basics run ...