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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The /proc file system brings the processes on your Unix systems into view in some very useful ways, but only if you take the time to cd over to /proc and see all it can tell you. The /proc virtual ...

There are a number of Linux commands that will display file system types along with the file system names, mount points and such. Some will also display sizes and available disk space. The df command ...

A fundamental of file systems since their inception has been their locking mechanisms. These exist so that different users and applications working on the same file (or region of a file) ...