Lesson 7 of 81974–today7 min
File systems: inodes and journaling
The 1974 Unix paper made a choice that most file systems on servers still follow: a file's name is not part of the file. Each file is described by an i-node holding its owner, permissions, size and the addresses of its blocks; a directory is just a file that maps names to i-node numbers. That is why one file can have two names, and why renaming a huge file is instant.
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Sources
- The UNIX Time-Sharing System (D. M. Ritchie, K. Thompson, CACM 17(7), 1974) — ACM
- inode(7): file inode information — Linux man-pages project
- ext4 data structures and algorithms: Journal (jbd2) — The Linux kernel documentation