Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

24.4. File system interfaces

In this section we will consider the system calls that the UNIX kernel provides for managing the file system. In UNIX files are identified within a hierarchical file system namespace, as described in Chapter 6. A simple example is shown in Figure 24.3. The namespace available on a UNIX system has a single root although, as we shall see in Section 24.4.1, it may be assembled by mounting a number of separate file systems together. Normal files present an unstructured random-access byte-stream abstraction, unlike many of the operating systems contemporary with classical UNIX in which files were divided into a series of records.

Figure 24.3. The hierarchical file system namespace.

The namespace can also contain various ...