The last time I had the occasion to interview Linus Torvalds, it was 2004, and version 2.6 of the Linux kernel had been recently released. I was working on a feature titled “Linux v2.6 scales the enterprise.” The opening sentence was “If commercial Unix vendors weren’t already worried about Linux, they should be now.” How prophetic those words turned out to be.

More than 12 years later -- several lifetimes in the computing world -- Linux can be found in every corner of the tech world. What started as a one-man project now involves thousands of developers. On this, its 25th anniversary, I once again reached out to Torvalds to see whether he had time to answer some questions regarding Linux’s origins and evolution, the pulse of Linux’s current development community, and how he sees operating systems and hardware changing in the future. He graciously agreed.

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I walked into an apartment in Boston on a sunny day in June 1995. It was small and bohemian, with the normal detritus a pair of young men would scatter here and there. On the kitchen table was a 15-inch CRT display married to a fat, coverless PC case sitting on its side, network cables streaking back to a hub in the living room. The screen displayed a mess of data, the contents of some logfile, and sitting at the bottom was a Bash root prompt decorated in red and blue, the cursor blinking lazily.

I was no stranger to Unix, having spent plenty of time on commercial Unix systems like OSF/1, HP-UX, SunOS, and the newly christened Sun Solaris. But this was different.

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For most casual users, the OS X command line, accessed via the Terminal app, is at least as murky and daunting as the Windows Command Prompt, to be used only in times of extreme distress. For those users, this is usually when something has gone inexplicably wrong, and typing cryptic commands into the prompt seems the only hope for a cure. Of course, most likely they’re actually restarting a launchd service or deleting a plist file.

To those familiar with the Unix shell, the command line or terminal is a powerful tool to be used to facilitate many system functions and interactions. Because OS X is built around a BSD core, you can bring over your fancy one-liners and skip the cumbersome GUI tools to do simple things like walking a directory tree, deleting every file older than 30 days, or pulling a list of files in the current directory that contain a specific text string. Although graphical interfaces can simplify many tasks, they can also complicate other tasks -- and the command line comes to the rescue.

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