Most UNIX systems today support some sort of remote file sharing . The most common of these is the Network File System, or NFS.

Under NFS, you can mount a directory from another machine as a filesystem. This means that the actual files reside on a disk elsewhere on the network — perhaps on Norm’s machine down the hall or on Eric’s machine on the other side of the country.

Some systems have automatic deletions

	We have a great system. Our administrator created a cron script that deletes any file that starts with a comma after a few days. I always use this convention when creating any kind of temporary file. I name a file something like, letter and a few days later it’s automatically deleted without me having to remember. That’s like being able to litter in your own home and not worry about picking up after yourself. (Now if I could only get it to work at home...)
	--Mike Sierra

At our company, we have two main offices, one in California and one in Massachusetts. When users from California come here, they find all the files that they use every day, remotely mounted onto our machine. The files are still being read and written on the hard disk in California, but users can work on them here in Massachusetts — it just takes a little bit longer to open and write files and to list directories.