Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
Modern Linux distributions include a /sys directory as a virtual filesystem (sysfs, comparable to /proc, which is a procfs), which stores and allows modification of the devices connected to the system, [20] whereas many traditional Unix-like operating systems use /sys as a symbolic link to the kernel source tree. [21]
Early Unix filesystems were referred to simply as FS.FS only included the boot block, superblock, a clump of inodes, and the data blocks.This worked well for the small disks early Unixes were designed for, but as technology advanced and disks grew larger, moving the head back and forth between the clump of inodes and the data blocks they referred to caused thrashing.
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 (/).
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 early versions of Unix, the root directory was the home directory of the root user, but modern Unix usually uses another directory such as /root for this purpose. In keeping with Unix philosophy , Unix systems treat directories as a type of file. [ 3 ]
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
The inode (index node) is a data structure in a Unix-style file system that describes a file-system object such as a file or a directory.Each inode stores the attributes and disk block locations of the object's data. [1]