Filesystems

A filesystem is a database of files and directories that you can attach to a Unix system at the root (/) or some other directory (like /usr) in a currently attached filesystem. At one time, filesystems resided on disks and other physical media used exclusively for data storage. However, the tree-like directory structure and I/O interface of filesystems is quite versatile, so filesystems now perform a variety of tasks.

Filesystem Types

Linux supports an extraordinarily large number of filesystems, including native designs optimized for Linux, foreign types such as the Windows FAT family, universal filesystems like ISO9660, and others. The following list includes the most common types of filesystems for data storage; the type names as ...

Get How Linux Works now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.