USB drive format, NTFS vs. FAT32

What are the pros and cons of formatting your USB drive in NTFS format or FAT32 format and vice versa?

Please highlight any advantages of one format over the other.

Keeping in mind I need to use the USB Flash drive on Ubuntu 13.04, Windows 7 and Windows XP.

NTFS (New Technology File System) is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft Corporation, and hence you may have to install additional programs on Linux / Mac in order to view partitions formatted with NTFS (like ntfs-3g).

FAT32 formatting is used to be recognised in all operating systems and there is a limit of 4 GB file in this case. I.e., you can't create a single file greater than 4 GB in FAT32 whereas you can create files larger than 4 GB in NTFS.

You can gain more insights via this link.

Well, I think it highly depends on the size and capacity of your flash drive, and what operating systems you want it to be supported by, and what security features you might require. As a general rule, and for regular USB flash memories, it would be the best to format them in FAT32, considering their capacity, and if you want all operating systems to easily support them. For more information you could refer to these articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat32#FAT32
http://cquirke.mvps.org/ntfs.htm