Questions tagged [filesystems]

A filesystem is a way to organize and store computer files with their data.

A file system (or filesystem) is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device(s) which contain it.

A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the specific characteristics of the device. There is usually a tight coupling between the operating system and the file system. Some filesystems provide mechanisms to control access to the data and metadata.

Ensuring reliability is a major responsibility of a filesystem. Some filesystems provide a means for multiple programs to update data in the same file at nearly the same time.

Further reading

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What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix?

There is a folder at the root of Linux and Unix operating systems called /lost+found/ What is it for? Under what circumstances would I interact with it? How would I interact with it?
Wesley
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/usr/bin vs /usr/local/bin on Linux

Why are there so many places to put a binary in Linux? There are at least these five: /bin/ /sbin/ /usr/bin/ /usr/local/bin/ /usr/local/sbin/ And on my office box, I do not have write permissions to some of these. What type of binary goes into…
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What is a bind mount?

What is a “bind mount”? How do I make one? What is it good for? I've been told to use a bind mount for something, but I don't understand what it is or how to use it.
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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how can I recursively delete empty directories in my home directory?

Possible Duplicate: How to remove all empty directories in a subtree? I create directories very often, scattered over my home directory, and I find it very hard to locate and delete them. I want any alias/function/script to find/locate and delete…
Santosh Kumar
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Find where inodes are being used

So I received a warning from our monitoring system on one of our boxes that the number of free inodes on a filesystem was getting low. df -i output shows this: Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 524288 422613 …
phemmer
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How to get the complete and exact list of mounted filesystems in Linux?

I usually use mount to check which filesystems are mounted. I also know there is some connection between mount and /etc/mtab but I'm not sure about the details. After reading How to check if /proc/ is mounted I get more confused. My question is: How…
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Script to monitor folder for new files?

How can I immediately detect when new files were added to a folder within a bash script? I would like the script to process files as soon as they are created in the folder. Are there any methods aside from scheduling a cron job that checks for new…
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Too many levels of symbolic links

I created this file structure: test/src test/firefox When I run this command: ln -s test/src test/firefox I would expect a symbolic link test/firefox/src to be created pointing to test/src, however I get this error instead: -bash: cd: src: Too…
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How does the sticky bit work?

SUID The sticky bit applied to executable programs flagging the system to keep an image of the program in memory after the program finished running. But I don't know that what it's stored in memory. And how I can see them, in this case.?
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Can I watch the progress of a `sync` operation?

I've copied a large file to a USB disk mounted on a Linux system with async. This returns to a command prompt relatively quickly, but when I type sync, of course, it all has to go to disk, and that takes a long time. I understand that it's going to…
mattdm
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Can I configure my Linux system for more aggressive file system caching?

I am neither concerned about RAM usage (as I've got enough) nor about losing data in case of an accidental shut-down (as my power is backed, the system is reliable and the data are not critical). But I do a lot of file processing and could use some…
Ivan
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What is a Superblock, Inode, Dentry and a File?

From the article Anatomy of the Linux file system by M. Tim Jones, I read that Linux views all the file systems from the perspective of a common set of objects and these objects are superblock, inode, dentry and file. Even though the rest of the…
Navaneeth Sen
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Why are hard links to directories not allowed in UNIX/Linux?

I read in text books that Unix/Linux doesn't allow hard links to directories but does allow soft links. Is it because, when we have cycles and if we create hard links, and after some time we delete the original file, it will point to some garbage…
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How do I find on which physical device a folder is located?

Specifically: I did sudo mkdir /work, and would like to verify it indeed sits on my harddrive and not mapped to some other drive. How do I check where this folder is physically located?
ripper234
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What is this folder /run/user/1000?

What is this folder: /run/user/1000 on my Fedora system and what does it do? ~ $ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on tmpfs 1.2G 20K 1.2G 1% /run/user/1000 EDIT: 7 june 2019. My two answers don't agree on what…
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