UNC

Vangie Beal
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:57 am

Short for Universal Naming Convention or Uniform Naming Convention, a PC format for specifying the location of resources on a local-area network (LAN). UNC uses the following format:

server-nameshared-resource-pathname

So, for example, to access the file test.txt in the directory examples on the shared server silo,you would write:

siloexamplestest.txt

You can also use UNC to identify shared peripheral devices, such as printers. The idea behind UNC is to provide a format so that each shared resource can be identified with a unique address.

UNC is supported by Windows and many network operating systems (NOS’s).