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File System Operations

Unix presents a uniform interface to file system objects
  • functions/syscalls manipulate objects as a stream of bytes
  • accessed via a file descriptor (index into a system table)
Some common operations:
  • stat() ... get meta-data about a file system object
  • mkdir() ... create a new directory
  • open() ... open a file system object, returning a file descriptor
  • close() ... stop using a file descriptor
  • read() ... read some bytes into a buffer from a file descriptor
  • write() ... write some bytes from a buffer to a file descriptor
  • fsync() ... ensure that data associated with a file descriptor is written to storage
  • lseek() ... move to a specified offset within a file