Linux has over 1,000 commands on a basic service. When you migrate to the desktop, that number grows. For example, in /usr/bin on Pop!_OS there are 1,615 commands, and in /usr/sbin, there are 609.

File systems and UUIDs have a special relationship on Linux systems. What are these very long identifiers and how can you view the connections between them and disk partitions? The /etc/fstab file is ...

One of the last things the Linux kernel does during system boot is mount the root filesystem. The Linux kernel dictates no filesystem structure, but user space applications expect to find files with ...

Some days, it doesn't rain, it pours. That's the case with Linux today. Not one, but two serious security holes have recently been exposed. First, there was a systemd bug which could easily knock out ...

With so many Linux distributions out there to choose from, there’s nothing like a good survey to offer fresh insight as to who’s using which ones. Focusing on the server realm, I already reported ...

The compression and decompression of files is one the most useful inventions in the history of computing, but the lack of portable and open tools poses a major obstacle to making the process as useful ...

One of the files that the average Unix sysadmin rarely looks at, almost never changes and yet depends on every time he or she reboots a system is the /etc/inittab file. This modest little file ...

You need to package up a bunch of files, send them somewhere, and do something with them at the destination. It isn’t an uncommon scenario. The obvious answer is to create an archive — a zip or tar ...

When Apple was about to introduce Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard, John Siracusa wrote in the summer of 2006 about how a new file system should be coming to Macs (which it did, 11 years later). The ...

Recreating a Linux system is a 5-minute task with NixOS's declarative approach.

If you have more than one Linux computer, you probably use ssh all the time. It is a great tool, but I’ve always found one thing about it strange. Despite having file transfer capabilities in the form ...