If you work with Unix files and folders a lot, you’ve probably already noticed that you can’t see many of them in the Finder—the /usr, /bin, and /etc folders, amongst many others, don’t show up in the ...

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 ...

Attaching a remote drive or directory on a Windows box is called “drive mapping” though the process is essentially the same as what we call mounting in the Unix world. While I rarely spend any ...

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 ...

Have you ever entered “ls –l” into a UNIX command line and seen something like this? Do you wonder what the “drwxr–r– “ means or why you can’t edit, open, or even read some files or directories? Well, ...

When transferring text files between Linux/Unix and Windows systems, you may encounter issues with line breaks and file formatting. This is because Windows uses both a line feed (LF) and a carriage ...

Unix systems provide numerous ways to compare files. The most common way to verify that you have received or downloaded the proper file is to compute a checksum and compare it against one computed by ...

Given the plethora of file types showing up on file servers today, the very idea of an “impossible” file type is hard to grasp. What would make a file type impossible after all? Would it defy ...

SCO says proprietary source code underlying Unix has been illegally copied into the Linux kernel. SCO critics argue that because the company shipped a Linux product under an open-source license, that ...