LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Objective 3: Perform Basic File Management

This section covers basic file and directory management, including filesystems, files and directories, standard file management commands, their recursive capabilities (where applicable), and wildcard patterns.

Filesystem Objects

Nearly every operating system that has ever been devised structures its collection of stored objects in a hierarchy, which is a tree of objects containing other objects. This hierarchy allows a sane organization of objects and allows identically named objects to appear in multiple locations—this is essential for multiuser systems like Linux. Information about each object in the filesystem is stored in a table (which itself is part of the filesystem), and each object is numbered uniquely within that table. Although there are a few special object types on Linux systems, the two most common are directories and files.

Directories and files

A directory is a container intended to hold objects such as files and other directories. A directory's purpose is primarily for organization. A file, on the other hand, exists within the directory and its purpose is to be responsible for raw data

storage. At the top of all Linux filesystem hierarchies is a directory depicted simply by /; this is known as the root directory. Beneath / are named directories and files in an organized and well-defined tree. To describe these objects, you simply refer to them by name separated by the / character. For example, the object ls is an executable ...