UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 UNIX Evolution and Standardization

A Brief Walk through Time

How Many Versions of UNIX Are There?

Why Is UNIX So Successful?

The Early Days of UNIX

The Early History of the C Language

Research Editions of UNIX

AT&T's Commercial Side of UNIX

The Evolution of BSD UNIX

BSD Networking Releases

UNIX Goes to Court

The NetBSD Operating System

The FreeBSD Operating System

The OpenBSD Operating System

Sun Microsystems and SunOS

System V Release 4 and Variants

Novell's Entry into the UNIX Market

Linux and the Open Source Movement

UNIX Standardization

IEEE and POSIX

The X/Open Group

The System V Interface Definition

Spec 11/70 and the Single UNIX Specification

UNIX International and OSF

The Data Management Interfaces Group

The Large File Summit

Summary

Chapter 2 File-Based Concepts

UNIX File Types

File Descriptors

Basic File Properties

The File Mode Creation Mask

Changing File Permissions

Changing File Ownership

Changing File Times

Truncating and Removing Files

Directories

Special Files

Symbolic Links and Hard Links

Named Pipes

Summary

Chapter 3 User File I/O

Library Functions versus System Calls

Which Header Files to Use?

The Six Basic File Operations

Duplicate File Descriptors

Seeking and I/O Combined

Data and Attribute Caching

VxFS Caching Advisories

Miscellaneous Open Options

File and Record Locking

Advisory Locking

Mandatory Locking

File Control Operations

Vectored Reads and Writes

Asynchronous I/O

Memory Mapped Files

64-Bit File Access (LFS) ...