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 ...

One of the last things the Linux kernel does during system boot is mount the root filesystem. The Linux kernel dictates no filesystem structure, but user space applications expect to find files with ...

We have looked at the fuser command before to display information about what users or processes are keeping file systems busy. This command can save you a lot of time tracking when you need to quickly ...

In the realm of modern data management, few technologies hold as much promise and versatility as the ZFS file system. Originally developed by Sun Microsystems for their Solaris operating system, ZFS ...

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 ...

A filesystem is a way that an operating system organizes files on a disk. These filesystems come in many different flavors depending on your specific needs. For Windows, you have the NTFS, FAT, FAT16, ...

In my last article I talked about working with shortcuts in Ubuntu Linux. In this article I want to explain the basics of the Linux file system and where you can expect to find things. Once again, I ...

The newest enterprise edition of the Suse Linux distribution allows administrators to go back in time, for instance, to immediately before they made that fatal system-crippling mistake. Suse Linux ...

Many people have read that post by Linus Torvalds in the comp.os.minix newsgroup on Usenet, or at least heard about it. Many more are aware of how that (free) operating system ended up taking over ...