File Management

File Management
• File Concept
• Access Methods
• Disk and Directory Structure
• File-System Mounting
• File Sharing
• Protection
 Objectives
• To explain the function of file
systems
• To describe the interfaces to file
systems
• To discuss file-system design
tradeoffs, including access methods,
file sharing, file locking, and directory
structures
• To explore file-system protection
 File Concept
• Contiguous logical address space
• Types:
– Data
• numeric
• character
• binary
– Program
• Contents defined by file’s creator
– Many types
• Consider text file, source file, executable file
 File Attributes
• Name – only information kept in human-readable form
• Identifier – unique tag (number) identifies file within file
system
• Type – needed for systems that support different types
• Location – pointer to file location on device
• Size – current file size
• Protection – controls who can do reading, writing, executing
• Time, date, and user identification – data for protection,
security, and usage monitoring
• Information about files are kept in the directory structure,
which is maintained on the disk
• Many variations, including extended file attributes such as file
checksum
• Information kept in the directory structure
File info Window on Mac OS X
 File Operations
• File is an abstract data type
• Create
• Write – at write pointer location
• Read – at read pointer location
• Reposition within file - seek
• Delete
• Truncate
• Open(Fi) – search the directory structure on disk
for entry Fi, and move the content of entry to
memory
• Close (Fi) – move the content of entry Fi in
memory to directory structure on disk
 Open Files
• Several pieces of data are needed to manage
open files:
– Open-file table: tracks open files
– File pointer: pointer to last read/write
location, per process that has the file open
– File-open count: counter of number of times a
file is open – to allow removal of data from
open-file table when last processes closes it
– Disk location of the file: cache of data access
information
– Access rights: per-process access mode
information
File Types – Name, Extension
 File Structure
• None - sequence of words, bytes
• Simple record structure
– Lines
– Fixed length
– Variable length
• Complex Structures
– Formatted document
– Relocatable load file
• Can simulate last two with first method by
inserting appropriate control characters
• Who decides:
– Operating system
– Program
Sequential-access File
 Access Methods
• Sequential Access
read next
write next
reset
no read after last write
(rewrite)
• Direct Access – file is fixed length logical records
read n
write n
position to n
read next
write next
rewrite n
n = relative block number

• Relative block numbers allow OS to decide where file should be placed

– See allocation problem in Ch 12
Simulation of Sequential Access on Direct-access File
 Other Access Methods
• Can be built on top of base methods
• General involve creation of an index for the file
• Keep index in memory for fast determination of
location of data to be operated on (consider UPC code
plus record of data about that item)
• If too large, index (in memory) of the index (on disk)
• IBM indexed sequential-access method (ISAM)
– Small master index, points to disk blocks of secondary
index
– File kept sorted on a defined key
– All done by the OS
• VMS operating system provides index and relative files
as another example (see next slide)
Example of Index and Relative Files
 Directory Structure
• A collection of nodes containing information about all files

Directory

Files
F1 F2 F4
F3
Fn

Both the directory structure and the files reside on disk

 Disk Structure
• Disk can be subdivided into partitions
• Disks or partitions can be RAID protected against
failure
• Disk or partition can be used raw – without a file
system, or formatted with a file system
• Partitions also known as minidisks, slices
• Entity containing file system known as a volume
• Each volume containing file system also tracks that
file system’s info in device directory or volume
table of contents
• As well as general-purpose file systems there are
many special-purpose file systems, frequently all
within the same operating system or computer
A Typical File-system Organization
 Types of File Systems
• We mostly talk of general-purpose file systems
• But systems frequently have may file systems, some
general- and some special- purpose
• Consider Solaris has
– tmpfs – memory-based volatile FS for fast, temporary
I/O
– objfs – interface into kernel memory to get kernel
symbols for debugging
– ctfs – contract file system for managing daemons
– lofs – loopback file system allows one FS to be accessed
in place of another
– procfs – kernel interface to process structures
– ufs, zfs – general purpose file systems
 Operations Performed on Directory
• Search for a file
• Create a file
• Delete a file
• List a directory
• Rename a file
• Traverse the file system
 Directory Organization

The directory is organized logically to obtain

• Efficiency – locating a file quickly

• Naming – convenient to users
– Two users can have same name for
different files
– The same file can have several
different names
• Grouping – logical grouping of files
by properties, (e.g., all Java
programs, all games, …)
 Single-Level Directory
• A single directory for all users

• Naming problem
• Grouping problem
 Two-Level Directory
• Separate directory for each user

Path name
Can have the same file name for different user
Efficient searching
No grouping capability
Tree-Structured Directories
 Tree-Structured Directories (Cont.)
• Efficient searching

• Grouping Capability

• Current directory (working directory)

– cd /spell/mail/prog
– type list
 Tree-Structured Directories (Cont)
• Absolute or relative path name
• Creating a new file is done in current directory
• Delete a file
rm <file-name>
• Creating a new subdirectory is done in current
directory
mkdir <dir-name>
Example: if in current directory /mail
mkdir count

Deleting “mail”  deleting the entire subtree rooted by “mail”

 Acyclic-Graph Directories
• Have shared subdirectories and files
 Acyclic-Graph Directories (Cont.)
• Two different names (aliasing)
• If dict deletes list  dangling pointer
Solutions:
– Backpointers, so we can delete all pointers
Variable size records a problem
– Backpointers using a daisy chain organization
– Entry-hold-count solution
• New directory entry type
– Link – another name (pointer) to an existing file
– Resolve the link – follow pointer to locate the file
General Graph Directory
 General Graph Directory (Cont.)
• How do we guarantee no cycles?
– Allow only links to file not subdirectories
– Garbage collection
– Every time a new link is added use a cycle
detection algorithm to determine
whether it is OK
 File System Mounting
• A file system must be mounted
before it can be accessed
• A unmounted file system (i.e., Fig. 11-
11(b)) is mounted at a mount point
Mount Point
 File Sharing
• Sharing of files on multi-user systems is desirable
• Sharing may be done through a protection scheme
• On distributed systems, files may be shared across
a network
• Network File System (NFS) is a common
distributed file-sharing method
• If multi-user system
– User IDs identify users, allowing permissions and
protections to be per-user
Group IDs allow users to be in groups, permitting
group access rights
– Owner of a file / directory
– Group of a file / directory
 File Sharing – Remote File Systems
• Uses networking to allow file system access between systems
– Manually via programs like FTP
– Automatically, seamlessly using distributed file systems
– Semi automatically via the world wide web
• Client-server model allows clients to mount remote file systems
from servers
– Server can serve multiple clients
– Client and user-on-client identification is insecure or complicated
– NFS is standard UNIX client-server file sharing protocol
– CIFS is standard Windows protocol
– Standard operating system file calls are translated into remote calls
• Distributed Information Systems (distributed naming services)
such as LDAP, DNS, NIS, Active Directory implement unified
access to information needed for remote computing
 File Sharing – Failure Modes
• All file systems have failure modes
– For example corruption of directory structures
or other non-user data, called metadata
• Remote file systems add new failure modes,
due to network failure, server failure
• Recovery from failure can involve state
information about status of each remote
request
• Stateless protocols such as NFS v3 include all
information in each request, allowing easy
recovery but less security
 File Sharing – Consistency Semantics
• Specify how multiple users are to access a
shared file simultaneously
– Similar to Ch 5 process synchronization algorithms
• Tend to be less complex due to disk I/O and network
latency (for remote file systems
– Andrew File System (AFS) implemented complex
remote file sharing semantics
– Unix file system (UFS) implements:
• Writes to an open file visible immediately to other users
of the same open file
• Sharing file pointer to allow multiple users to read and
write concurrently
– AFS has session semantics
• Writes only visible to sessions starting after the file is
closed
 Protection
• File owner/creator should be able to control:
– what can be done
– by whom
• Types of access
– Read
– Write
– Execute
– Append
– Delete
– List
 Access Lists and Groups
• Mode of access: read, write, execute
• Three classes of users on Unix / Linux
RWX
a) owner access 7  111
RWX
b) group access 6  110
RWX
c) public access 1  001

• Ask manager to create a group (unique name),

say G, and add some users to the group.
• For a particular file (say game) or subdirectory,
define an appropriate access.

Attach a group to a file

chgrp G game
Windows 7 Access-Control List Management
A Sample UNIX Directory Listing