Files

Everything in NTFS is a file. Everything. As you'll soon see, even the MFT and other system data structures are implemented as files. Even directories are implemented as special files. A file is nothing more than a collection of attributes and one or more streams. Attributes include the following:

  • Standard information. This could be various dates (creation, last access, and so on), attributes (such as hidden, system, archive, and read-only), and a hard link count, which I'll discuss in a moment.

  • Names. A file can have several names. NTFS stores the primary filename as a Unicode string. A DOS 8. 3 filename may also exist, as well as the names of any hard links.

  • Security descriptor. It is attached to every file, just like every other object ...

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