Dave McKay

Of all the Bash commands, poor old eval probably has the worst reputation. Justified, or just bad press? We discuss the use and dangers of this least-loved of Linux commands.

How can you check if two Linux binaries are the same? If they’re executable files, any differences might mean unwanted or malicious behavior. Here’s the easiest way to check if they differ.

Privacy is an increasingly hot topic. On Linux, the gpg command lets users encrypt files using public-key cryptography, in which case losing your encryption keys would be catastrophic. Here’s how to back them up….

In Linux, all directories and files have access permissions. You can use chmod to set your preferred access rights for different users. But what decides their default permissions? Let’s talk about umask….

The Linux arping command is like ping, but for local networks only. Its advantage is it operates at a lower networking level, sometimes getting responses when ping cannot. Here’s how to use it.

If there’s one thing Linux is well-equipped with, it’s utilities for manipulating strings. But there’s a whole set of functionality built right into the Bash shell too. Here’s how it’s used.

Counting the number of lines, words, and bytes in a file is useful, but the real flexibility of the Linux wc command comes from working with other commands. Let’s take a look.

Directories on Linux let you group files in distinct, separate collections. The downside is it becomes tedious moving from directory to directory to perform a repetitive task. Here’s how to automate that….

With thousands of free Linux applications, it’s easy to lose track of what you once installed but no longer use. Here’s how to list the installed applications on the major Linux families.

Sometimes Linux users need to exchange files with computers running other operating systems, such as Windows or macOS. That’s simple enough with a USB drive—as long as it is formatted correctly.

If you ask a bunch of Linux users what they download files with, some will say wget and others will say cURL. What’s the difference, and is one better than the other?

Ever installed Linux on a laptop, rebooted, and found it can’t see your Wi-Fi card? It’s pretty deflating. Try these hints. One or more of them might just get it working.

Since 1974, the Linux grep command has been helping people find strings in files. But sometimes grep is just too thorough. Here are several ways to tell grep to ignore different things.

Adding users to a Linux computer is a basic administration task, and there are several ways to achieve this. Each method has benefits and drawbacks. We explain three different techniques for you.

Renaming a directory in Linux is easy, and there are plenty of ways to go about it. From renaming a single directory to finding and renaming many, here’s how to do it.