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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In an effort to turn around its dwindling Unix revenue, SCO introduced a new version of its OpenServer product Wednesday along with a new open-source-friendly attitude. OpenServer 6 is based on the ...