Ralph Shumaker wrote:
Darren New wrote:
No. I'm pointing out that "the arrangement of blocks on a disk" is not
what makes a file system. Why is the pipe system not a file system?
How about FIFOs? How about unix-domain sockets? Are those file
systems, or parts thereof? How about sockets, or Ameoba's file
servers, or NFS? What about Eros, where all files are stored in memory?
"Filesystem" is an API abstraction to access persistent store. That's
probably as concise and specific a definition as I can make.
I hand the API a foo, and it gives me a bar. The foo is generally
called a filename. The bar is generally called a file.
The fact that a "file" actually means file handle/descriptor and behaves
like a "stream" is a particular UNIXism. Many other operating systems
do *not* agree with this. Big Iron often requires a name and an
authority key and the system return records.
Pipes, FIFO's, unix-domain sockets, and network sockets are generally
not considered filesystems because they lack persistence. They *are*
considered streams.
Databases *could* be considered filesystems depending upon how they are
used. ZFS looks quite a bit more like a "database" than most current
filesystems.
-a
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