Question

Discuss file management, which is the concept of how one would physically manage folders and files. Select an operating system, such as Windows, Linux, or MacOS.

Explore how this operating system could handle file management.

Describe the main components and functions of file management in an operating system.

Describe different operating system requirements for file management. Describe the fundamental file types, file structures, and file management of different fundamental operating systems.

Compare and contrast file management of two operating systems.

Describe how files and folders are created, edited, and deleted from both a command line and Windows GUI.

Answer 1

Computer can store information on various storage medias like magnetic tape, magnetic disk, optical disk etc. To make computer system easy to use Operating system provides uniform logical view of the information storage.

File management system is a component of Operating System that create or delete or update blocks of memory on secondary storage of the system and manages indexes that let the computer know where on the storage device does the block starts and ends. Though distributed file management works in a quite different way than described above.
It may sound weird but it is true that for a computer there is nothing called file, but only blocks of bits. It is the Operating System that creates an illusion of files for the user and also handles those block of memory in a particular way. This is one of the few reasons why certain partition file formats are not useable by certain OS. For example, Ext3 format used by many Linux Distributions cannot be used with Microsoft Widows.

For file management, different OS uses different types of File Managers. Few of them are mentioned below:

• Orthodox File Managers (Not used now, was used in 80's & 90's)
• Navigational File Managers (Windows Explorer)
• Spatial File Manager (Similar to Navigational but opens different directories in a different window, example: Windows explorer on Windows 95)

Let us discuss Windows File System.

Windows support four main file system namely NTFS, exFAT, UDF and FAT32 which have their own advantages and disadvantages. Among these NTFS is most widely used File system.

Main components of file management are:

• File attributes: This contains the metadata about the file such as the File Name(human readable format), Identifier (ususaly number to identify a file, not human readable), Type, Location, Size, Protection (if the file is write protected, or can it accessed by any user etc), Time and Date
• File Operations: This include different operations on a file such as File creation, Write to file, Read a file, Move a file, Delete a file.
• Access Methods: Describes how a file can be accessed, may be Sequential Access (information in the file is accessed in sequence, one record after another) or Random Access (also known as direct access)
• Directory and Disk Structure: Determines the disk structure and the file system being used by the system. Partioning information is also managed by this component which is useful for managing file sizes access. It also manages the SWAP spaces and also the raw (unformatted) space on the drive.
• Directory overview: most commonly used function by the end user of operation system. this include File Search, Rename a File, Traverse the file system.
• File Mounting System: Just like file must be opened before accessing, File system must be mounted before being accessed by the system. mount process is straight forward, OS gives the mount device name and mount point. Different system uses different mount point.
• File Sharing: As the name suggests it manages the file sharing between different users in a multi user situation. User are allowed to protect sesnsitive data by restricting access to other users.

Various file types are as follows:

Common File types

file type	usual extention	function
text	txt, doc, docx	Textual data
rich text	doc, rtf, docx, wf	Text data along with formatigng may contain images, table etc
archive	zip, rar, tar, arc	relative files grouped, generally compressed for storage purpose
batch	bat, sh	commands to be executed serially
executable	exe, com, or none	machine language file ready to run
multimedia	mp3, avi, mov	Binary file containing multimedia data
source code	java, c, cpp	Source code written in different languages
object	obj, o, class	intermediate compiled files
library	lib, dll, a	libraties that can be attached to program
point of view	pdj, jpg	ASCII or binary file that viewed as it is in all system

File structure:

File structure varies from system to system and application to application. Different application parses the file in its own format, for example
a java source code is an ASCII file will have a format starting with import statements followed by class declaration and method declaration. Such files can be easily represented using regular expressions.
Macintosh OS supports minimal number of file structure. It expects file to contain two parts: a resource fork and a data fork.
Internal file structure also varies from OS to OS, since linux treats a file as a stram of Bytes (group of 8bits).
JPEG file contains a header part that contais all the essential meta-data and the Body that contains image data.

Windows vs UNIX:

• case sensitive: Windows trates file and FILE as same file, but not UNIX
• Windows uses black slash to seperate directories but UNIX uses forward slashes
• Windows has drive letter but UNIX dont
• Windows does not allow to modify opened files but UNIX does allow

Windows command line interface:

• mkdir newFolderName: make directory/folder named newFolderName
• type NUL > 1.txt : create an empty file 1.txt
• edit 1.txt : to edit file
• del 1.txt : will delete 1.txt file
• del newFolderName : will delete folder with name newFolderName

Using GUI:

• right click -> new -> new folder
• right click -> new -> new text file
• right click file/folder -> delete