Advanced Programming in

the UNIX Environment

Week 04, Segment 1: The Unix Filesystem

Department of Computer Science

Stevens Institute of Technology

Jan Schaumann
jschauma@stevens.edu
https://stevens.netmeister.org/631/
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

• a disk can be divided into logical partitions

2
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

physical blocksize

• a disk can be divided into logical partitions

first NetBSD partition
second NetBSD partition
NetBSD portion of disk
3 entire disk
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

• on each logical partition you may create a file system containing the cylinder groups

4
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

• each cylinder group contains a list of inodes (i-list) as well as the actual directory-
and data blocks

5
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

6
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

#123

• data blocks containing the actual data (i.e., contents of the file) are referenced from
the inode

7
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

#123

#123

• a directory entry is really just a hard link mapping a “filename” to an inode

8
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

#123

#123

#123

• a directory entry is really just a hard link mapping a “filename” to an inode

• you can have many such mappings to the same inode

9
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

• directories are special "files" containing a list of hard links

10
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

• each directory contains at least two entries:

• "." -- this directory

• ".." --
Jan Schaumann the parent directory 11
2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

12
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Inodes

• The inode number in a directory entry must point to an inode on the same file system
(no hardlinks across filesystems).

13
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Inodes

• The inode number in a directory entry must point to an inode on the same file system
(no hardlinks across filesystems).

• The inode contains most of the information found in the struct stat.

• Every inode has a link count (st_nlink): it shows how many “things” point to this
inode. Only if this link count is 0 (and no process has the file open) are the data
blocks freed.

14
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Inodes

• To move a file within a single filesystem, we can just ”move” the directory entry
(actually done by creating a new entry, and deleting the old one).

15
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Inodes

• To move a file within a single filesystem, we can just ”move” the directory entry
(actually done by creating a new entry, and deleting the old one).

16
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Inodes

• To move a file within a single filesystem, we can just ”move” the directory entry
(actually done by creating a new entry, and deleting the old one).

17
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

The Unix Filesystem

Visualizing the Unix Filesystem helps us understand the concept of hard links, what
directories "look like", and how operations on a directory are independent of the files
and their data.

Coming up: creating, removing, and renaming links (hard and symbolic)

link(2) unlink(2) rename(2) symlink(2) / readlink(2)

18
Jan Schaumann 2020-09-17