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 ...

There are four ways to specify that a file is in UNIX System Services when you use the FILENAME statement or FILENAME function: You can also use these specifications in combination. For example, you ...

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 ...

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 ...

Head and tail are great commands when you want to look only at the beginning or the ending of files. Getting a feel for how the lines in a file are changing over time, on the other hand, can take a ...