One of the questions that Unix users are sometimes reluctant to ask is how all the directory names — like /etc, /var and /usr/local — came about in the first place. Why did we adopt the particular ...

People who have had bad experiences on Windows disks that performed poorly after they had become very fragmented often wonder if they need to apply some kind of periodic analysis and defragmentation ...

If you're new to the UNIX operating system, especially if you're familiar with Windows, you'll find that the file access control mechanisms might not be exactly what you expect. File permissions and ...

There are many ways to move files between Unix and Windows. In my mind, they fall into three categories — secure copy (let’s not even think about ftp), shared drives, and file synchronization. Each ...

SAS Program That Creates Data Sets and Transport Files: OS/390 The FILENAME statement assigns the libref TPORT to the physical location TPORT.DAT, which stores the entire library to be created. The ...

The only thing that’s really hard about extracting from archives on Unix systems is remembering all of the commands and the required options. When you have ten or more possible archive types and could ...

Wired's newly-revamped Webmonkey site has an informative guide on seeing, changing, and understanding file permissions in Unix-like systems. These are the kind of operations and syntax that can often ...