A rundown of the biggest, most expansive and impressive games that you can run entirely in your Linux shell. The original UNIX operating system was created, in large part, to facilitate porting a video game to a different computer. And, without UNIX, we wouldn't have Linux, which means we owe the very existence of Linux to...video games. It's crazy, but it's true.

Love Arduino but hate the GUI? Try arduino-cli. In this article, I explore a new tool released by the Arduino team that can free you from the existing Java-based Arduino graphical user interface. This allows developers to use their preferred tools and workflow. And perhaps more important, it'll enable easier and deeper innovation into the Arduino toolchain itself.

Times have changed every character but one in Neal Stephenson's classic. That one is Linux. I was wandering through Kepler's, the legendary bookstore, sometime late in 1999, when I spotted a thin volume with a hard-to-read title on the new book table. In the Beginning...Was the Command Line, the cover said.

Summer. 1980-something. An elementary-school-attending, Knight Rider-T-Shirt-wearing version of myself slowly rolls out of bed and shuffles to the living room. There, nestled between an imposingly large potted plant and an over-stocked knick-knack shelf, rested a beautifully gray, metallic case powered by an Intel 80286 processor—with a glorious, 16-color EGA monitor resting atop. This was to be my primary resting place for the remainder of the day: in front of the family computer. That PC had no graphical user interface to speak of—no X Window System, no Microsoft Windows, no Macintosh Finder. There was just a simple command line—in this case, MS-DOS. (This was long before Linux became a thing.) Every task I wished to perform—executing a game, moving files—required me to type the commands in via a satisfyingly loud, clicky keyboard. No, "required" isn't the right word here. Using the computer was a joy. "Allowed" is the right word. I was allowed to enjoy typing those commands in. I never once resented that my computer needed to be interacted with via a keyboard. That is, after all, what computers do. That's what they're for—you type in commands, and the computer executes them for you, often with a "beep".

Sure, it may be hard, but it is possible to give up graphical interfaces entirely—even in 2019. About three years back, I attempted to live entirely on the command line for 30 days—no graphical interface, no X Server, just a big-old terminal and me, for a month. I lasted all of ten days.

On June 29, 2019, the FreeDOS Project turns 25 years old. That's a major milestone for any open-source software project! In honor of this anniversary, Jim Hall shares this look at how FreeDOS got started and describes its Linux roots.

Create handy command-line utilities in Rust. This article is about text processing in Rust, but it also contains a quick introduction to pattern matching, which can be very handy when working with text. Strings are a huge subject in Rust, which can be easily realized by the fact that Rust has two data types for representing strings as well as support for macros for formatting strings. However, all of this also proves how powerful Rust is in string and text processing.

Learn a few techniques for avoiding the pipe and making your command-line commands more efficient. Anyone who uses the command line would acknowledge how powerful the pipe is. Because of the pipe, you can take the output from one command and feed it to another command as input. What's more, you can chain one command after another until you have exactly the output you want.

Learn the fundamentals of sorting and de-duplicating text on the command line. If you've been using the command line for a long time, it's easy to take the commands you use every day for granted. But, if you're new to the Linux command line, there are several commands that make your life easier that you may not stumble upon automatically. In this article, I cover the basics of two commands that are essential in anyone's arsenal: sort and uniq.

Cron is nice and all, but don't forget about its cousin at. When I first started using Linux, it was like being tossed into the deep end of the UNIX pool. You were expected to use the command line heavily along with all the standard utilities and services that came with your distribution. At lot has changed since then, and nowadays, you can use a standard Linux desktop without ever having to open a terminal or use old UNIX services. Even as a sysadmin, these days, you often are a few layers of abstraction above some of these core services.

In part II of this series of articles on doing date math from the command line we want to try to solve a problem we noted in part I: passing the date command a date specification something like "the first Monday after some date".

If you've ever used a spreadsheet, you've probably used or seen functions for doing date math—in other words, taking one date and adding some number of days or months to it to get a new date, or taking two dates and finding the number days between them. The same thing can be done from the command line using the lowly date command, possibly with a little help from Bash's arithmetic.

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 SHell (Bash) was developed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) under the GNU Project, which gives it a somewhat special reputation within the Open Source community. Today, Bash is the default user shell on most Linux installations. Although Bash is just one of several well known UNIX shells, its wide distribution with Linux makes it an important tool to know.

Grepping is awesome, as long as you don't glob it up! This article covers some grep and regex basics. There are generally two types of coffee drinkers. The first type buys a can of pre-ground beans and uses the included scoop to make their automatic drip coffee in the morning. The second type picks single-origin beans from various parts of the world, accepts only beans that have been roasted within the past week and grinds those beans with a conical burr grinder moments before brewing in any number of complicated methods. Text searching is a bit like that.

Learn a few different ways to get a progress bar for your dd command. The dd tool has been a critical component on the Linux (and UNIX) command line for ages. You know a command-line tool is important if it has only two letters, and dd is no exception.

As a novice software developer, the one thing I look for when choosing a programming language is this: is there a library that allows me to interface with the system to accomplish a task? If Python didn't have Flask, I might choose a different language to write a web application. For this same reason, I've begun to develop many, admittedly small, applications with Bash. Although Python, for example, has many modules to import and extend functionality, Bash has thousands of commands that perform a variety of features, including string manipulation, mathematic computation, encryption and database operations. In this article, I take a look at these features and how to use them easily within a Bash application.

Boasting as many pages as most technical books, this month’s issue of Linux Journal comes in at a hefty 181—that’s 23 articles exploring topics near and dear to everyone from home automation hobbyists to Free Software advocates to hard-core hackers to high-level systems architects.