The question above is the only question on Google Labs Aptitude Test that relates to an Operating System. It’s a good question: it immediately gets rid of fanboys who can’t see anything wrong with any tool they love, and allows people who are passionate and knowledgeable enough about Unix to demonstrate the can either:

• see Unix’s faults
• tell Google they prefer Unix in uppercase, just like MULTICS was.

This is part one of a multipart series, published over the next two weeks. This week: text processing.

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Bash, the default shell in Linux and OS X, loses history data after running multiple shells at the same time - for example, using multiple tabs in the terminal. The fix is simple, but not widely known.

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Yeah, I’ve read them too. Lists of shell tricks you already know - pstree (wow!) bc (bash already has built-in math), and a dozen commands you see in every Linux site, book, and training course.

Here’s a list of damn useful commands you haven’t heard before.

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