We can compare a filesystem to a refrigerator, or any other storage with multiple shelves that is used for storing different items. These shelves or compartments help us to organize grocery items in our refrigerator by certain characteristics, such as shape, size, type, and so on. The same analogy is applicable to a filesystem, which is the epitome of storing and organizing collections of data and files in human-usable form.

A filesystem is organized in an inverted root tree design with / (a forward slash; pronounced root) as the root of the filesystem, and underneath /, we see the rest of the directories and subdirectories, as shown in the following diagram:

This layout of the filesystem hierarchy is described in the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

Here, / represents two things...

We could spend a good amount of time learning CentOS 7; it is equivalent to serving you cooked food, but in place of this, we could actually learn how to cook, so that you'll be able to make your own different recipes. Linux has one of the best and largest bodies of documentation in the operating system for most of the commands and their options. Whether you are an experienced user or a beginner, you will never remember the exact use of all the Linux commands and utilities, each with its own multiple options. It is in this case that Linux documentation comes to our rescue.

There are multiple sources of documentation available in...

In this section, we will see the meta-characters and expansion technique that can improve file management efficiency.

The bash shell can match a pathname based on some meta-characters. This feature is known as file globbing. The pathname matching capability was historically called globbing (also known as pattern-matching or wildcard matching) for managing a large number of files. It expands the meta-characters used in filenames and pathnames.

When using file globbing for matching filenames or pathnames, the meta-characters are replaced by the list of matching pathnames prior to command execution. The following table lists the pattern and its corresponding result:

Commands are names of programs installed on the system. Before proceeding with the basic command operation, let's have a look at the two types of path traversal in Linux:

• Absolute path: This method specifies the full path of a file, regardless of your current location. This path always begins with a leading / (root directory) and specifies each subdirectory traversed in order to uniquely represent a single file in the filesystem. This removes any ambiguity whatsoever in the pathname. One directory is separated from another by a forward slash (/) in the pathname. While creating shell scripts, this type of naming convention should be used to refer to a file. Absolute pathnames are long to type in comparison to relative pathnames, which are used frequently when working on the command line to refer to a file or directory.
• Relative path...

Archiving is the process of fetching multiple files from the same or different locations and putting them into a single file bundle. It is generally done together with compression, or immediately followed by compression. This helps in streamlining the backup process, as discussed in the following section.

File data is generally compressed to save the disk space and reduce traffic, as well as the time to transmit files over a network. Linux has multiple utilities for compression; some of them are listed in the table that follows:

In this chapter, we understood the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and different types of built-in documentation. Thereafter, we covered basic command-line operations, which included filesystem navigation and filesystem management from the command line. Finally, we got our hands dirty with different types of compression techniques and archiving in Linux.

In the next chapter, we will learn about different methods of managing text files.