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 ...

If you're new to the UNIX operating system, especially if you're familiar with Windows, you'll find that the file access control mechanisms might not be exactly what you expect. File permissions and ...

I booted UNIX V4 (first C rewrite) in a PDP‑11 emulator. It feels tactile—no backspace, staggered print, slower typing, and ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Maybe its pervasiveness has long obscured its origins. But Unix, the operating system that in one derivative or another powers nearly all smartphones sold worldwide, was born 50 years ago from the ...

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 ...