Unix环境高级编程中这么描述文件系统

File System:

The UNIX file system is a hierarchical arrangement of directories and files. Everything starts in the directory called root whose name is the singal character / .

A directory is a file that contains directory entries. Logially, we can think of each directory entry as containing a filename along with a structure of information describing the attributes of the file. The attributes of a file are such things as type of file(regular file, directory), the size of the file, and when the file was last modified. The stat and fstat functions return a structure of information containing all the attributes of a file. In Chapter 4, we will examine all the attributes of a file in great detail.

We make a distinction between the logical view of a directory entry and the way it is actually stored on disk. Most implementations of UNIX file system do not store attributes in the directory entries themselves, because of the difficulty of keeping them in synch when a file has multiple hard links. This will become clear when we discuss hard links in Chapter 4.