What do these file system and directory names tell us about the intended content? To best understand why particular conventions were adopted, hark back to the early days of Unix and how the ...

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.

For UNIX System Services files that are created by SAS, the file mode for new files is "-rw-rw-rw-"; however, this mode is modified by the current file-mode creation mask.

While you’re unlikely to see many Unix systems with fragmentation reaching higher than 5%, it’s good to know what you can do to defragment a file system if and when you run into this situation.

All files on a Unix system are accessed via a path that starts with / (the root directory), and you can mount different hard drives at different points in the file system according to your needs.

These files or directories typically contain configuration information or log files for the Unix system. The .bash_history file, for example, logs all the commands you enter on the command line.

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 ...

UNIX file permissions are fickle, and it only takes one mistake to prevent your Mac from working correctly. UNIX is a very powerful operating system, and we've barely scratched the surface.

While the average Unix user is generally satisfied by the date/time stamps that he sees when using the ls -l command, it is sometimes useful to remember that there are actually several time stamps ...