Navigating through the Filesystems

In this chapter, we will revisit the concepts of a file, which were discussed briefly in Chapter 1. You will learn in detail about the filesystem (FS) in Linux and its specifics. We will not go to certain filesystem implementations, as you will see there’re many, but we will establish the fundamentals of working with them. You will learn more about Linux’s FS hierarchy – its partitions, object types, and some frequently used operations.

You will get familiar with the filesystem library in C++, allowing you to execute system operations independently from the platform. We will use C++ examples to show you simple applications for file management. You’re also going to learn about string_views. Some of the operations you learn about here will be revisited again in Chapter 5, when we will discuss error handling.

Last but not least, you will learn hands-on about the fundamental inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism...