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The original Unix file system supported three types of files: ordinary files, directories, and "special files", also termed device files. [1] The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) and System V each added a file type to be used for interprocess communication: BSD added sockets, [3] while System V added FIFO files.
The most common special file is the directory. The layout of a directory file is defined by the filesystem used. As several filesystems are available under Unix, both native and non-native, there is no one directory file layout. A directory is marked with a d as the first letter in the mode field in the output of ls -dl [5] or stat, e.g.
In keeping with Unix philosophy, Unix systems treat directories as a type of file. [3] Caveats include not being able to write to a directory file except indirectly by creating, renaming and removing file system objects in the directory and only being able to read from a directory file using directory-specific library routines and system calls ...
In computing, a directory structure is the way an operating system arranges files that are accessible to the user. Files are typically displayed in a hierarchical tree structure . File names and extensions
This was an artifact of early Unix programming. Specifically, when Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were migrating Unix to a PDP-11, the contents of the /bin and /lib directories, which were to be the first directories mounted on startup and to contain all essentials for the OS to function, became too large to fit on an RK05 disk drive. So they ...
Unix abstracts the nature of this tree hierarchy entirely and in Unix and Unix-like systems the root directory is denoted by the / (slash) sign. Though the root directory is conventionally referred to as /, the directory entry itself has no name – its path is the "empty" part before the initial directory separator character (/).
Unix directories are lists of association structures, each of which contains one filename and one inode number. The file system driver must search a directory for a particular filename and then convert the filename to the correct corresponding inode number.
Unix (/ ˈ j uː n ɪ k s / ⓘ, YOO-niks; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 [1] at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. [4]