Glossary - U        A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U  V W X

UNC - Universal Naming Convention

Universal Naming Convention - A common method for accessing files on a network drive without using a mapped drive letter. Names specified this way are called UNC names, and typically appear as \\server\volume\path\filename, where server is the name of the network server where the files reside, volume is the name of a disk volume on that server, and the path\filename portion is a directory name and file name.

UNICODE - A character set standard, designed and  maintained by the non-profit Unicode Consortium (http://unicode.org). Windows 2000 introduced an implementation of 16-bit UNICODE (65536 potential distinct values) intended to facilitate use of non-English languages. The first two bytes of Unicode text files in NTFS systems contain a signature representing the file encoding.

UDF - User Defined Function.

User Defined Function - A function defined by the user utilizing the FUNCTION command to manipulate strings, dates, and filenames; perform arithmetic; read and write files; and perform other similar functions. UDFs are invoked the same way as Variable functions.