Types of File Systems
Commonly speaking, every OS has its own unique filesystem. A Files made on one operating system are not readable on any other operating system. Recently, Unix supports more filesystems than any other operating system. Whenever Unix is installed the filesystem is created on the hard disk. A filesystem is a device that is formatted to store files that can be randomly accessed as far as Unix is concerned. This involves the hard disk partitions, floppy disks, CD-ROMs, but not tapes drives (that are accessed sequentially and therefore cannot hold a filesystem per se).
The current list of main filesystems supported via Unix are as follows:
- Linux Swap Filesystem - swap
- MS-DOS Filesystem - msdos
- Network File System (NFS) - nfs
- Novell Filesystem - ncpfs
- NT - ntfs
- Second Extended Filesystem - ext2 (Linux standard filesystem)
- Uniform Filesystem - ufs Used through BSD and SunOS
Categories of Files are available in 8 flavors:
- Normal Files
- Directories
- Hard Links
- Symbolic links
- Sockets
- Named Pipes
- Character Devices
- Block Devices