7. File Operations

This chapter covers file systems. It explains the various levels of file operations in operating systems. These include preparing storage devices for file storage, file system support functions in kernel, system calls, library I/O functions on file streams, user commands and sh scripts for file operations. It presents a systematic overview of file operations, from read/write file streams in user space to system calls to kernel space down to the device I/O driver level. It describes low level file operations, which include disk partitions, example programs to display partition tables, format partitions for file systems and mount disk partitions. It presents an introduction to the EXT2 file system of Linux, which include the EXT2 file system data structures, example programs to display superblock, group descriptor, blocks and inodes bitmaps and directory contents. The programming project is to integrate the knowledge about EXT2/3 file systems and programming techniques presented in the chapter into a program which converts file pathnames into inodes and print their information.