Chapter 14. Working with Files

Drupal has the ability to upload and download files in a variety of ways. In this chapter, you'll learn about public and private files and how they're served, deal briefly with the handling of media files, and look at Drupal's file authentication hook.

How Drupal Serves Files

Drupal follows the same mechanism for accessing files that the UNIX operating system does, streams. Streams revolutionized how UNIX accesses files, treating files as just another resource that can be accessed and interacted with through a common set of functions (system calls). The power of streams is that the concept of a file can be extended to include virtually anything that is accessible electronically yet the function calls to interact with ...

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