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 ...

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 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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

When I send a text file via FTP from windows to unix, I am having conversion issues. <BR>1. If I send the file via ascii, all of the tabs in windows are converting to 8 spaces in unix.<BR>2. If I send ...

One of the files that the average Unix sysadmin rarely looks at, almost never changes and yet depends on every time he or she reboots a system is the /etc/inittab file. This modest little file ...

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 ...