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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

When transferring text files between Linux/Unix and Windows systems, you may encounter issues with line breaks and file formatting. This is because Windows uses both a line feed (LF) and a carriage ...

Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs ...

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 ...

The only thing that’s really hard about extracting from archives on Unix systems is remembering all of the commands and the required options. When you have ten or more possible archive types and could ...

I’ve followed your guide to building a home server with FreeNAS, but I’m not sure what to do with the permissions on my files. Can I just set them all to 777, or is that insecure? This stuff is like ...