isr.co.ro : glossary File A collection of information treated as a single unit by the storage and housekeeping routines provided by a computer's operating system. Most routines don't care what's in a file--much as a file cabinet works the same regardless of what's written on the piece of paper. But because of historical factors, many Internet programs need special settings or preprocessing to handle files that contain binary content, such as programs, rather than just "plaintext."