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 ...

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 ...

The Unix operating system is one of computing's most significant technologies, providing the framework that the familiar Linux and Mac OS X operating systems were developed on. Unix can be a viable ...

GUIs are great—we wouldn’t want to live without them. But if you’re a Mac or Linux user and you want to get the most out of your operating system (and your keystrokes), you owe it to yourself to get ...

Businesses have proprietary information such as customer lists that need protection. The easiest way to protect only a few critical files is to encrypt and decrypt them manually. Unix system come with ...