Chapter 2. UNIX File System Objects

The early aspects of the UNIX file system design were conceived in the summer of 1969, largely by Ken Thompson at Bell Telephone Labs (BTL). An early version of the UNIX file system was loaded onto disk by paper tape. This allowed Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie to "drive the file system into the contortions that we wanted to measure," as Ken has been quoted.

Since this humble beginning, the basic ideas of the UNIX file system design have been copied in all other modern operating systems. This chapter will focus mostly on the objects that the UNIX file system presents to the users of the system. You will also examine some of the most basic operating system calls for working with file system objects from within your C program.