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. File permissions and ...

You are not alone. In fact, I was pretty confused by file permissions for a long time, but it’s actually very simple! Here’s why you should care, and how to understand the permissions that keep your ...

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, ...

Unix permissions control who can read, write or execute a file. You can limit it to the owner of the file, the group that owns it or the entire world. For security reasons, files and directories ...

A file system provides attributes for files and directories on an operating system to help you determine which users on your computer can read, modify, or execute the contents of its files and ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...