File Systems

Users can directly operate and manage data on secondary storage devices, but this approach is complex, error-prone, and unreliable. Multiprogramming and time-sharing systems require easy and reliable sharing of file data on high-capacity secondary storage devices. File systems are designed to meet these requirements. This chapter describes the basic concepts and implementation of file systems and provides an example to illustrate the implementation of a standalone file system. For details about distributed file systems, see Chap. 8 .