There may be times — such as when you’re trying to convey to someone where a file can be found on their machine, or maybe when you’re writing a website post — when you need to put the path to some file or folder into another document. In both OS X 10.4 and 10.5, it turns out there are many ways to do this. So short of just typing out the full path, what exactly are your options?

If you’d like to use a third-party solution, there are a number of contextual menu plug-ins available that add a “copy path to clipboard” feature to the Finder. In addition, PathFinder offers path copying as a standard feature. This post, however, is all about doing things with what Apple provides. So here are some solutions that don’t require any third-party tools.

First, you can use the Services menu. In both 10.4 and 10.5, the Services menu works in the Finder. With the object whose path you’d like to capture selected in the Finder, choose Finder -> Services -> TextEdit -> New Window from Selection. A new TextEdit window will appear containing the full path to the selected item. Press Command-A to select it all, then Command-C to place it on the clipboard.

Another option is dragging the object from the Finder and dropping it into a TextEdit window (or a Terminal window). This will only work if your TextEdit document is in plain text mode—if you use rich text mode and drag in something TextEdit can open, such as a JPEG image file, the file will be opened. But with TextEdit set to plain text mode, you’ll instead see the path to the file or folder. Again, just select it and copy it to the clipboard, and you’re done. Some third-party text editors support this feature as well.

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One of the commonly recommended general troubleshooting techniques is to delete the various cache files on your drive.

Doing so can remove unwanted or corrupt settings that an application otherwise continues to use.When dealing with internet-related symptoms, Apple offers similar advice: Trash your cache!

In particular, Apple Support advises going to the Library/Caches folder of the home directory and deleting its contents. This is not the totality of Apple’s advice when dealing with internet-related problems, but it is a key component.

There are other ways to delete cache files beyond dragging them to the trash in the Finder. In particular, several third-party utilities will delete cache files with little more than a click of the mouse. In addition, they offer options as to what subsets of your caches you might want to delete.

Two such utilities are Cocktail (Tiger edition/Leopard edition) and Leopard Cache Cleaner. However, be warned: if you’ve updated to Mac OS X 10.5.3, make sure you also update to the latest versions of these utilities. Both of them have new versions, required for compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5.3. For example, Cocktail 4.1.1, released right after OS X 10.5.3, “fixes a bug causing Mac OS X 10.5.3 to freeze during clearing of the system caches and addresses compatibility issues with Automator 2.0.1.”

Regardless of what model Mac you have or what version of software you’re using, there are some things you really ought to know about your computer setup. If you only know five things about your computer, let it be these:

1. What operating system (and version) is on your Mac?

Unless you are using an older Mac that is capable of running older, antiquated systems such as OS8 or OS9, your computer is using some form of OSX (the “X” being roman numeral for “Ten”). The first iteration of OSX was known simply as System 10 (code named Cheetah). Subsequent versions of OSX are commonly known as 10.1 (Puma), 10.2 (Jaguar), 10.3 (Panther), and 10.4 (Tiger). The most current OS available for your Mac is now 10.5 (Leopard). Knowing your specific version is quite importand, as so much depends on it. For example, very few printers work on anything older than 10.2 anymore. Similarly, many programs these days only have OS X compatibility, and you have to know which version they will support (currently, Quicken 2007 only supports 10.3+ while TurboTax 2006 still supports 10.2+). Knowing the operating system (OS) and which computer model you have (iMac, iBook, MacBook, Mac Pro, etc) will go a long way when communicating with technicians and other Mac users.

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iTunes automatically sorts playlists alphabetically. However, iPhoto doesn’t automatically do the same thing for photo albums. Albums can be manually dragged and dropped into any order you wish. But this can be tedious for a long list of albums. Fortunately, in iPhoto 8, there is an easier way.

Although iPhoto won’t sort albums for you automatically, a hidden feature in iPhoto ’08 makes it easier for you to alphabetize them manually. Just right-click (or Control-click) one of your album names in iPhoto, and choose Sort Albums from the contextual menu that appears. iPhoto will simultaneously alphabetize your smart albums as a group and alphabetize your regular albums as a separate group.