Sharing Files and Applications Across UNIX and Windows Machines

Ways are available for accessing Windows files and applications from within the UNIX operating environment, or for accessing UNIX files from within the Windows environment. One such way is to use a TCP/IP utility such as ftp to transfer files from one machine to the other. A second way is to use a Windows-based application that is an enhancement of ftp to perform a file transfer from one machine to the other. A third way is to treat a remote UNIX file system as though it were local to your Windows PC network, via a product such as Samba. A fourth way is to set up a virtual network among different machine environments using Virtual Network Computing (VNC). This section discusses each of these methods.

Accessing Your UNIX Files from a Windows Machine

Many computing environments include machines running Windows and UNIX together. When you work with both, you may need to transfer files from a Windows system to a UNIX system or from a UNIX system to a Windows system. You may also want to log in to a UNIX system from your Windows PC to access files using terminal emulation, which was discussed previously. Or you may want to share files on Windows machines and UNIX machines. This section describes some capabilities that provide Windows–to–UNIX System networking.