March 2003
Intermediate to advanced
912 pages
27h 17m
English
As far as the file storage service is concerned, the objects it stores (files) are unstructured sequences of bytes. The filing system must be able to identify each file uniquely in the filing system and, to achieve this, will associate an identifier with a given file (we shall call this the system-file-identifier, SFID).
A directory is a structured object and comprises a list of entries, each of which associates a text name with information on the named object, including its SFID. The directory service will use the storage service to store directories. A directory is therefore given a SFID by the filing system. This is discussed further in Section 6.4, and Figure 6.4 gives an example of a directory object with ...