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I want to attach some files to a post on one of Stack Exchange sites. What is the best way to do this?

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4 Answers 4

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Use a file upload service like SkyDrive and post the link on the page like so:

<a href="http://file">file</a>
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    I have problems with skydrive links, some users complain they can't download them. Their browser sees the skydrive URL ending in.zip and tries to download the HTML and save it as a zip.
    – Warren in Toronto
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 15:41
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    Good file hosting sites include Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Mediafire
    – Stevoisiak
    Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 18:15
  • And github gists
    – Peter V. Mørch
    Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 9:44
  • @StevenVascellaro It's odd. I don't consider a single one of those to bee a good filehosting site. All to often I encounter dead links after a couple of years.
    – Daniel F
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 9:28
  • Yup, that is what happens: Dead link and useless. It is pretty stupid to not let users upload files and having to use another site to host the files. This should be integrated in this site itself. Especially which hosting site do you use? Which services will still be available years later? Nobody knows.
    – Markus Bawidamann
    Commented Mar 26 at 21:41
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Host them somewhere else and post a link. StackOverflow does not provide file hosting services.

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    ...and there's a reason for that!
    – uɐɯsO uɐɥʇɐN
    Commented Apr 23, 2010 at 21:37
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    @GeorgeEdison ... And what is the reason?
    – Mukul Goel
    Commented Nov 5, 2012 at 8:24
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    because that can get expensive and abused. They do now though, but only 1 image file up to 2mb. Drag and drop, baby!
    – Dan Csharpster
    Commented Feb 14, 2017 at 21:51
  • drag'n drop of non-image files does not work, at least not in FF 56
    – Andreas Covidiot
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 11:03
  • No, storage is dirt cheap today, it is just a integral flaw of the site.
    – Markus Bawidamann
    Commented Mar 26 at 21:42
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LaTeX is just code, so if you have a question about how to do something in LaTeX, just include a snippet like you would any other piece of code.

(Hint: indent it by four spaces, or select it and click the 'binary' icon in the toolbar of the edit window.)

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I'd recommend using Pastebin for this scenario

PS: Seems that people didn't notice that the requester was asking to include LaTeX files, which are markup based ones, thus they are plain text files!

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    Not relevant. Pastebin is only for text, while the question here is about files. Anyone can post text as part of the question/answer itself.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jul 19, 2017 at 19:49
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    @ShadowWizard Latex files are simple text files, that's why I suggested PasteBin!
    – Gonzalo Vasquez
    Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 1:05
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    How is this answer different from: meta.stackexchange.com/a/47690/158100 or the accepted answer?
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 17:08
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    @rene there are huge differences from my point of view: from the link a snippet would be useful only if it's not long, as the question body has a character limit, which I've overcome before using PasteBin and, from the accepted answered both solved the problem, but in different ways as a link to a file to download, is not a link to a site where you can actually see the file contents, maybe subtle, but the are different indeed.
    – Gonzalo Vasquez
    Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 17:30
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    Ok, I've gone the extra mile. I must be missing something. I have pastebinned a LaTeX snippet that I found on GitHub. What makes PasteBin now so much different then GitHub, SkyDrive, DropBox or even a gist. So if PasteBin is so much preferable above all other filesharing options what is the extra feature that I fail to see? For a moment I thought they implemented a latex renderer or is that only available in the pro version of it?
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 18:47
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    @rene I guess from your comment that Gist is even more adequate than PasteBin for this purpose, as it's "code" related and, not just text. As PasteBin and Gist post can be done anonymously, makes them waste no space from your prefered file sharing provider (DropBox, Google Drive, etc), and makes posts discardable. Maybe it's just a subjective perspective, but makes it cleaner for me
    – Gonzalo Vasquez
    Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 19:30
  • @GonzaloVasquez; pastebin has a size limit of 500KB for the free account.
    – Henrik Staun Poulsen
    Commented May 14, 2019 at 14:25

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