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 ...

It hurts to see your programs taken apart and their weaknesses exposed, but it will make you a better programmer.

You normally think of a critical section — that is, a piece of a program that excludes other programs from using a resource — as a pretty advanced technique. You certainly don’t often think of them as ...

We have the user-friendly AppleScript and now Automator. But long before either of these existed, there were shell scripts —series of Unix commands saved as mini-programs. By learning how to write ...

Regarding the ability to create a double-clickable Terminal script (see previous item), Scott Lahteine notes that: AppleScript Menu can do more than just run AppleScripts. It allows you to run Perl ...

Linux Journal, representing 25+ years of publication, is the original magazine of the global Open Source community.

If you're not yet comfortable with writing scripts on Unix and Linux systems, this post might get you off to a healthy start. Creating a script on a Unix or Linux system can be dead easy or ...

Oh happy day! I got an e-mail from a reader with a shell script question that didn't appear to be homework from a programming class or anything to do with hacking passwords. The reader wrote: I am ...

FFmpeg was designed as a cross-platform solution for video and audio recording, conversion, and streaming. Its About page describes the command-line tool as “the leading multimedia framework, able to ...