Unix file categories

Contains filesystem mount points. These are used, for example, if the system uses multiple hard disks or hard disk partitions. Such a case could occur, for example, if a hard disk drive suffers physical failures and cannot be properly mounted.

Many systems clear this directory upon startup; it might have tmpfs mounted atop it, in which case its contents do not survive a reboot, or it might be explicitly cleared by a startup script at boot time. Users other than root can access their own mail only.

Contains print jobs, mail spools and other queued tasks. Ordinary files — An ordinary file is a file on the system that contains data, text, or program instructions. Used to store your information, such as some text you have written or an image you have drawn.

This is the type of file that you usually work with. Do not contain other files. Directories — Directories store both special and ordinary files. A directory file contains an entry for every file and subdirectory that it houses.

CP command is used to copy the file content from source file to target file. Ls command is most commonly used unix command to show the list of files in that working directory. If user wants to remove file forcefully use -f option. Below is the description of all type of files. This is the Unix user who created this file. Every Unix user will have an associated group. In the ls -l listing example, every file line begins with a d , - , or l.

These characters indicate the type of the file that's listed. Metacharacters have a special meaning in Unix. If you want to display all the files ending with just. An invisible file is one, the first character of which is the dot or the period character. Unix programs including the shell use most of these files to store configuration information. You can use the vi editor to create ordinary files on any Unix system.

The above command will open a file with the given filename. The two most common file types are regular files and directories. Regular files are by far the most common type of files in a UNIX system, with program source, documents, executable programs, and scripts all being stored as regular files. One could argue that executable files are a special type of regular file but their handling by the filesystem is just the same, that is, the file contains a stream of bytes that the filesystem never needs to interpret.