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 ...

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 ...

November 28, 2012 Add as a preferred source on Google Add as a preferred source on Google You are not alone. In fact, I was pretty confused by file permissions for a long time, but it’s actually very ...

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 ZIP archive is recognized by most operating systems, thus making it useful for compressing and archiving files regardless of the OS that your employees or customers use. If your company uses one ...

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 ...

Log files on Unix systems can easily grow to hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines. Here's a simple way to pluck out every Nth line. Head and tail are great commands when you want to look ...

If you use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, ...