Data Structure using C SEM-

Unit-5 File Structure

 File Structures
 A file structure is a combination of representations for data in
files. It is also a collection of operations for accessing the data. It
enables applications to read, write, and modify data. File structures
may also help to find the data that matches certain criteria. An
improvement in file structure has a great role in making applications
hundreds of times faster.
 The main goal of developing file structures is to minimize the
number of trips to the disk in order to get desired information. It
ideally corresponds to getting what we need in one disk access or
getting it with as little disk access as possible.
 What is file?
 A file a container in a computer system that stores data, information,
settings, or commands, which are used with a computer program. In
graphical user interface (GUI), such as Microsoft operating systems,
represent the files as icons, which associate to the program that opens
the file.
 There are several types of files available such as directory files, data
files, text files, binary and graphic files, and these several kinds of
files contain different types of information. In the computer system,
files are stored on hard drives, optical drives, discs, or other storage
devices.
 In most of the operating systems, a file must be saved with a unique
name within a given file directory. However, certain characters cannot
be used during creating a file as they are considered illegal. A
filename is consisted of with a file extension that is also called a
suffix. The file extension contains two to four characters that follow
the complete filename, and it helps to recognize the file format, type
of file, and the attributes related to the file.
 What is a file system?
 In computing, a file system -- sometimes written filesystem -- is a
logical and physical system for organizing, managing and accessing
the files and directories on a device's solid-state drive (SSD), hard-
disk drive (HDD) or other media. Without a file system, the operating

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system (OS) would see only large chunks of data without any way to
distinguish one file from the next. As data capacities increase, the
efficient organization and accessibility of individual files becomes
even more important in data storage.

 How file systems work

 A file system stores and organizes data. It can be thought of as a type
of index for all the data contained in a storage device. In addition to
SSDs and HDDs, file systems are used for optical disks, flash drives
and magnetic tape.

 File systems specify conventions for naming files, including the

maximum number of characters in a name, which characters can be
used and -- in some systems -- how long the file name extension can
be. In many file systems, file names are not case sensitive.

 Along with a file's content data, a file system

maintains metadata about the files along with other information. The
metadata might include details such as the file size, creation date or
location in the directory.

 Most file systems organize files in a directory hierarchy, with a file's

location described by its path within the directory structure. The
directories -- folders in Windows -- are organized into an inverted
hierarchical tree structure, with the root directory at the top. Each file
is placed in a directory or subdirectory at the desired location within
the tree structure.

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File Service Architecture:

 File Service Architecture is an architecture that provides the facility of

file accessing by designing the file service as the following three
components:
 A client module
 A flat file service
 A directory service
 The implementation of exported interfaces by the client module is
carried out by flat-file and directory services on the server-side.

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 Directory module: This module gives the relation to file names by

connecting them to their corresponding file IDs.
 File module: This module serves the purpose of relating file IDs to specific
files.
 Access control module: This module provides the controlling feature by
validating the requested operation.
 File access module: This module refers to the reading and writing of file
data or attributes.
 Block module: This module accesses and allocates the disk block.
 Device module: This module refers to the disk I/O and buffering.

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 File Allocation Methods


 The allocation methods define how the files are stored in the disk blocks.
There are three main disk space or file allocation methods.
 Contiguous Allocation
 Linked Allocation
 Indexed Allocation
1. Contiguous Allocation

 In this scheme, each file occupies a contiguous set of blocks on the disk.
For example, if a file requires n blocks and is given a block b as the
starting location, then the blocks assigned to the file will be: b, b+1,
b+2,……b+n-1. This means that given the starting block address and the
length of the file (in terms of blocks required), we can determine the
blocks occupied by the file.
The directory entry for a file with contiguous allocation contains
 Address of starting block
 Length of the allocated portion.
 The file ‘mail’ in the following figure starts from the block 19 with
length = 6 blocks. Therefore, it occupies 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 blocks.

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Advantages:
 Both the Sequential and Direct Accesses are supported by this. For
direct access, the address of the kth block of the file which starts at
block b can easily be obtained as (b+k).
 This is extremely fast since the number of seeks are minimal because of
contiguous allocation of file blocks.
Disadvantages:
 This method suffers from both internal and external fragmentation.
This makes it inefficient in terms of memory utilization.
 Increasing file size is difficult because it depends on the availability
of contiguous memory at a particular instance.

2. Linked List Allocation

 In this scheme, each file is a linked list of disk blocks which need not
be contiguous. The disk blocks can be scattered anywhere on the disk.
The directory entry contains a pointer to the starting and the ending file
block. Each block contains a pointer to the next block occupied by the
file.
 The file ‘jeep’ in following image shows how the blocks are randomly
distributed. The last block (25) contains -1 indicating a null pointer and
does not point to any other block.

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Advantages:
 This is very flexible in terms of file size. File size can be increased
easily since the system does not have to look for a contiguous chunk
of memory.
 This method does not suffer from external fragmentation. This makes
it relatively better in terms of memory utilization.
Disadvantages:
 Because the file blocks are distributed randomly on the disk, a large
number of seeks are needed to access every block individually. This
makes linked allocation slower.
 It does not support random or direct access. We can not directly
access the blocks of a file. A block k of a file can be accessed by
traversing k blocks sequentially (sequential access ) from the starting
block of the file via block pointers.
 Pointers required in the linked allocation incur some extra overhead.
3. Indexed Allocation
 In this scheme, a special block known as the Index block contains
the pointers to all the blocks occupied by a file. Each file has its own
index block. The ith entry in the index block contains the disk
address of the ith file block. The directory entry contains the address
of the index block as shown in the image:

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Advantages:
 This supports direct access to the blocks occupied by the file and
therefore provides fast access to the file blocks.
 It overcomes the problem of external fragmentation.
Disadvantages:
 The pointer overhead for indexed allocation is greater than linked
allocation.
 For very small files, say files that expand only 2-3 blocks, the
indexed allocation would keep one entire block (index block) for the
pointers which is inefficient in terms of memory utilization.
However, in linked allocation we lose the space of only 1 pointer per
block.

 MS_DOS FAT file System

 What is File Allocation Table (FAT)?
 File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system that was developed by
Microsoft to support small disks and simple folder structures. The file
system is named File Allocation Table because it uses a table to track
the clusters on a storage volume, as well as how those clusters are linked
together through their associated files and directories. Because of the
table's important role, the acronym FAT is sometimes used to refer to the
table itself, rather than the file system, although it's not uncommon to see
it used both ways in a single resource.

 The FAT file system got its start with the introduction of MS-DOS, or
Microsoft Disk Operating System, and is still in use today, but it has
evolved over the years to accommodate growing data volumes. During
that time, there have been multiple versions of the file system. The
original version was FAT8, followed by FAT12, then FAT16 and finally
FAT32. Several variants have also been developed based on the last three
versions -- FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 -- further extending the file
system.

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 The number associated with each FAT version (e.g., FAT16) refers to the
number of bits that are used for each entry in the allocation table. For
example, an allocation table entry for a FAT16 volume is 16 bits long.
However, it's not just the number of entry bits that differentiates the FAT
versions. Each version also supports larger volumes and file sizes than its
predecessor. Even so, FAT is still limited to small-scale storage compared
with more modern file systems. The largest file size FAT32 can support
is 4 gigabytes, and the largest volume size is 2 terabytes.

 At one time, the FAT file system was used extensively for Windows
computers. However, today, most Windows systems use the New
Technology File System (NTFS) -- or, to a lesser degree, the Resilient
File System (ReFS), which Microsoft introduced in 2012 promising to
support greater availability, resiliency and scalability.

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 Tree-structured directory Structure

 The directory is structured in the form of a tree. It also has
a root directory, and every file in the system has a unique path.

 A directory within a tree-structured directory may contain files or

subdirectories. Special system calls are used to create or remove
directories.

 One bit in each directory entry is used to identify the entry as either a file
(represented by ‘0’) or a directory (represented by ‘1’).

 Tree-structured directory

 Users

 Each user has their own directory and cannot access the directory of
another user. All users can read data from the root directory.
However, they cannot write to or modify the root directory. This
privilege is reserved for the system administrator who has complete
access to the root directory.

 User directories

 Paths

 We can access a file using two types of paths. These are:

 Absolute path
 Relative path

 The absolute path is the path to the file with respect to the root
directory.

 The relative path is the path to the file with respect to the current
working directory.

 Path Types

 Consider the above directory tree. Let’s assume that the current working
directory is: root/home/Desktop.

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 To access the file under the directory labeled Edpresso, we can use the
following paths:

 Relative path: Edpresso

 Absolute path: root/home/Desktop/Edpresso

 Advantages
 A tree-structured directory is very general because every file can be
accessed using its absolute path.

 It is also very scalable since we can easily create or remove directories

and subdirectories. This also reduces the probability of name collisions
within a directory.

 Tree-structured directories also allow for easier searching, as we can use

both the absolute or relative paths for a file.

 Disadvantages
 Tree-structured directories do not allow file sharing between users.

 They are also inefficient in the sense that accessing a file may force you
to go under multiple directories.

Advantages Disadvantages
General Inefficient
Scalable No file sharing
Easy to Seacrh File duplication in multiple directories

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