If you use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, ...

Welcome to old-style Internet access -- souped up for your surfing pleasure! In this chapter I take you on a fast flight through the few Macintosh programs that can work over a Unix command-line ...

One particular frustration with the UNIX shell is the inability to easily schedule multiple, concurrent tasks that fully utilize CPU cores presented on modern systems. The example of focus in this ...

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 ...

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 ...

OPERATING SYSTEM VENDORS talk a good game in terms of interoperability, but their objective is to get you off competitors’ software and onto theirs. As such, transparent interoperability is not a high ...

In one of my classes we're creating a shell in C. I've got everything working except how to store local variables. <BR><BR>global variables are being stored in "extern char** environ" and right now ...