Lecture Notes for Operating Systems
Files and Directories, 20 November 2000
- the file system - provides storage that's large, permanent, and easily
sharable
- files
- named collections of data - name + extension; version information;
where's the semantics
- file structures
- unstructured - a byte sequence
- record oriented - but what is a record; fixed and variable length
- keyed structures - tree-like; more towards databases; databases as
file systems
- file types
- text or binary - human readable
- character special or block - device access
- magic numbers - file and /etc/magic
- what determines the semantics - ease vs. flexibility
- file access patterns - sequential, random; optimize access patterns;
usually assume random
- file attributes - information about files; protection, password,
creator, owner, rwx permissions, length, modified times, temporary
- file operations - create, delete; open, close; read, write, append;
seek, get or set attributes, renaming
- directories - files about files
- over-all file organization - flat, semi structured, hierarchical
- directories contain information about structure and files
- path naming - absolute, relative
- operations - link and unlink
This page last modified on 20 November 2000.