hi i'm logged on to my schools unix machine via putty. how do i open/view a jpg picture file that is there on my root catalog?
You need to download the jpeg to your workstation and open it there.
I think that putty is just a ssh client. You will need to use ftp or something to download that jpeg.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "root catalog". You don't want to put too many files in the root directory....that will slow down performance on the system overall. You really should put them in a subdirectory somewhere.
If you are connected with putty then you can most likely download the image you desire to your Win32 machine by using putty version of scp (secure copy).
It is available here.
I have used it with great success.
There is also the putty version of sftp but I like the pscp.exe better. It supports wildcards while the psftp.exe doesn't support the mget command.