Understanding the filesystem

A filesystem is not only a tree of files and folders exposed to the Linux user, but it's also the structure and management to access and save data, and keep everything consistent. As already mentioned, you often hear the phrase that in Linux, everything is a file, and this is true. This means that a lot of different things in Linux get abstracted as files. For example, a directory is a file, hardware devices get represented by special system files, or ,useful, such as a random number generator, is also a file.

Let's quickly recap and summarize what we already know about working with files from the last two chapters. ls lists and displays files, touch creates a file, files are case sensitive, and . files are hidden files and are excluded from normal command execution, such as the ls command, and also from shell expansion using file globbing...