Computer Science Illuminated, 7th Edition

11.2 Directories

As mentioned earlier, a directory is a named collection of files. It is a way to group files so that you can organize them in a logical manner. For example, you might place all of your papers and notes for a particular class in a directory created for that class. The operating system must carefully keep track of directories and the files they contain.

A directory, in most operating systems, is represented as a file. The directory file contains data about the other files in the directory. For any given file, the directory contains the file name, the file type, the address on disk where the file is stored, and the current size of the file. The directory also contains information about the protections set up for the file. In ...