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 ...

While the average Unix user is generally satisfied by the date/time stamps that he sees when using the ls -l command, it is sometimes useful to remember that there are actually several time stamps ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

Want to get Unix/Linux techies arguing? Besides classic flame wars such as whether vi or EMACS is the better text editor, another surefire way to start a fight is to talk about which file systems are ...

One of the difficulties of switching from one OS to the other is trying to locate all the system files and keep track of where the new OS stores all its settings. The image above, which you can also ...

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 ...

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 ...