CPSC 1280 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Inode, Grep

• School: Langara College
• Department: Computer Science
• Course: CPSC 1280
• Professor: Wei Cai

Document Summary

Road map: filesystem, index node, file attribute, pathname, links. Inode: system organize file attributes separately from content, file and directory entries are identified by inode number. Multiple names for one inode: the inode doesn"t contain inode number, inode number starts from 1 in every filesystem. Files in two file systems may have the same inode number: possible to consume all inodes before disk is full, number of inodes are limited in file system, large number of small files. File types: ordinary or regular file, directory, device file, symbolic link. Why do we need to make this distinction: same command can handle multiple file types cp foo1 foo2 cp foo1 /users/wcai, instead of having different commands to handle these three situations, a single command can do the job. Advantages: two files can have same name (with different path, easier user access control for system administrators, assign directories with different privileges.