Filesystem

A filesystem controls how data is named, stored, accessed, and retrieved on a device such as a hard drive, USB, DVD, or another medium. There is no one filesystem, and how it behaves largely depends on what OS you are using. You must have heard of FAT, FAT32, NFTS, and so on, which are all different filesystems and are used normally by Windows. Linux can read and write to them, but it generally uses a different family of filesystems that have names starting with ext, which stands for extended. You do not need to have a deep understanding of filesystems, but, as a software engineer, it is good to at least have a basic understanding of the subject.

What interests us in this chapter, however, is that each filesystem has its conventions for naming files, such as the length of the filename, the specific characters that can be used, how long the suffix or file extension can be, and so on. Each file has information or metadata, data embedded within a file or associated with...