Working with Files
Follow your own path, and let people talk.
Files provide persistent storage of information. If you want data to be available for longer than the length of time it takes your app to run, perhaps even years, you store that data in files. A physical storage device might be a hard disk drive (HDD), solid-state drive (SSD), or a flash drive in today’s phones, laptops, and servers.
This book doesn’t cover how the physical devices work or low-level software access to the hardware. Instead, in this chapter, we look at the abstraction of storing and retrieving information with files. We group files into directories or folders, which may be nested. The files and the folders constitute the file system. The operating system manages the file system and is one of the OS’s most essential roles.
Topics covered in this chapter
