Solaris™ 9 System Administrator Exam Cram™ 2 (Exams 310-014 and 310-015)

File and Directory Concepts

Data stored on file systems consists of directories and files. Directories serve as folders to arrange the files into some organized user-defined structure. In reality, all the files and directories are stored more or less randomly on the disk. The files and (other) directories are then referenced or linked into directories to provide the organization. In addition, there are several types of special files that are actually interfaces to hardware devices, such as disk drives and tape drives.

Sometimes files and directories may not be needed often or use up more space than desired. To address this issue, Solaris 9 provides several utilities to compress files and directories so that they take up less space, but can be ...