Re: On file systems

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> Remember
> Apple's "fat binaries", which contained a binary for 68K and another
> for PowerPC? Those were made with "forks", which was Apple's variant
> of "several streams in one file". And so on.

The most extreme example i know is Solaris:

  https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E36883/fsattr-5.html

  fsattr - extended file attributes

  Description
  Attributes are logically supported as files within the file system.
  The file system is therefore augmented with an orthogonal name space of
  file attributes. Any file (including attribute files) can have an
  arbitrarily deep attribute tree associated with it. Attribute values
  are accessed by file descriptors obtained through a special attribute
  interface.

So every file can have a second job as directory ... in theory.
In practice, though:

  Implementation are [...] permitted to reject operations that are not
  supported. For example, the implementation for the UFS file system
  allows only regular files as attributes (for example, no
  sub-directories) and rejects attempts to place attributes on attributes.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas