I recently switched to Mac OS X as my primary desktop operating system after spending over a decade on Linux. Although Apple’s operating system supplies practically all of the command line tools I ...

Check if a file is really a file, whether a string contains anything, and whether you can run a program with these vital patterns.

It is no secret that we often use and abuse bash to write things that ought to be in a different language. But bash does have its attractions. In the modern world, it is practically everywhere. It can ...

Jason Snell recently explained how to use Applescript to automate the popular Twitter client Twitterific. But, with the help of some simple shell scripting, you can also send quick status updates ...

Dungeons, Dragons and Dice—a script that lets you roll those 3d6 and 2d20 that a surprising number of games require. In my last article, I talked about a really simple shell script for a game called ...

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I'm pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not.