Abbreviated AFS. A protocol developed at Carnegie Mellon University; used to share remote files across systems using TCP/IP.
AFS has certain advantages over NFS in that it only allows users to access files linked to AFS rather than giving access to all files, it has a built-in cache that helps to reduce the demands made on the system, and system administrators can allocate disk space on the fly as required.
See also Distributed File System; Network File System; Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.