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What's a file?
What's a file?
Length: 60 minutes
Description
Of all the many parts of Unix, the inode is the thing that makes Unix most like Unix, because Unix is all about files, and the inode is the filesystem data structure that represents a file. This talk takes the output of ls -l as a jumping-off point to discuss the inode and how the kernel uses it for essential operations such as permissions checking, reading and writing files, and the Unix rm and chmod commands.- What's a File?
- ls -l
- ls -l
- drwxr-xr-x 3 mjd users 4096 2007-11-22 21:01 bin
- Overview of Unix Filesystem Structure
- Inodes
- include/linux/fs.h
- Permissions
- Reading
- Reading
- Reading
- open
- Directories
- open
- open
- drwxr-xr-x 3 mjd users 4096 2007-11-22 21:01 bin
- One file with two names?
- chmod
- chmod
- link
- Links are symmetric
- rm
- rm
- rm
- Symbolic link
- Thank You!
tgz file of the entire talk
Related Talks
This was supposed to be a "revised" version of my 2001 talk on The Structure and Implementation of the ext2 Filesystem, but I ended up rewriting it from scratch.
If you found this interesting, you may want to read the other followups to the earlier talk. In 2002, I gave a followup talk about the Unix process structure. I later revised the talk to include more detailed Perl examples. The original talk about processes and the revised version with examples are both available.
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