What's a file?

Length: 60 minutes

Description

Of all the many parts of Unix, the inode is the thing that makes Unix most like Unix, because Unix is all about files, and the inode is the filesystem data structure that represents a file. This talk takes the output of ls -l as a jumping-off point to discuss the inode and how the kernel uses it for essential operations such as permissions checking, reading and writing files, and the Unix rm and chmod commands.

Complete Slides

1. What's a File?
2. ls -l
3. ls -l
4. drwxr-xr-x 3 mjd users 4096 2007年11月22日 21:01 bin
5. Overview of Unix Filesystem Structure
6. Inodes
7. include/linux/fs.h
8. Permissions
9. Reading
10. Reading
11. Reading
12. open
13. Directories
14. open
15. open
16. drwxr-xr-x 3 mjd users 4096 2007年11月22日 21:01 bin
17. One file with two names?
18. chmod
19. chmod
20. link
21. Links are symmetric
22. rm
23. rm
24. rm
25. Symbolic link
26. Thank You!

tgz file of the entire talk

Related Talks

This was supposed to be a "revised" version of my 2001 talk on The Structure and Implementation of the ext2 Filesystem, but I ended up rewriting it from scratch.

If you found this interesting, you may want to read the other followups to the earlier talk. In 2002, I gave a followup talk about the Unix process structure. I later revised the talk to include more detailed Perl examples. The original talk about processes and the revised version with examples are both available.

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