Shared resource

In computing, a shared resource, or network share, is a computer resource made available from one host to other hosts on a computer network.^[1][2] It is a device or piece of information on a computer that can be remotely accessed from another computer transparently as if it were a resource in the local machine. Network sharing is made possible by inter-process communication over the network.^[2][3]

Some examples of shareable resources are computer programs, data, storage devices, and printers. E.g. shared file access (also known as disk sharing and folder sharing), shared printer access, shared scanner access, etc. The shared resource is called a shared disk, shared folder or shared document

The term file sharing traditionally means shared file access, especially in the context of operating systems and LAN and Intranet services, for example in Microsoft Windows documentation.^[4] Though, as BitTorrent and similar applications became available in the early 2000s, the term file sharing increasingly has become associated with peer-to-peer file sharing over the Internet.