Can if I can just be sure its not going to mangle my files....

Shift-click works OK in Netscape. Except it sometimes does stupid things with gzip-compressed files - it decompresses them but leaves the .gz extension on the filename. That's just annoying, though, the uncompressed file is still OK.

Try the "file" command on Linux, it tells you what kind of file something is:

aero:~> file /bin/ls
/bin/ls: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Regards,
Borislav