The term file system takes its name from the old paper-based data management systems, where we kept documents as files and put them into directories.

Well, without a file system, the storage device would contain a big chunk of data stored back to back, and the operating system wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Why do we need a file system in the first place, you may ask? However, these concepts remain relevant to other environments and file systems. To keep this guide manageable, I'll concentrate on Unix-like environments when explaining the lower-level concepts or console commands. This guide helps you understand file systems in many contexts. When people talk about file systems, they might refer to different aspects of a file system depending on the context - that's where things start to seem knotty.Īnd you might end up asking yourself, WHAT IS A FILE SYSTEM ANYWAY? 🤯 If the requested resource is a file, it's fetched from a file system. Whenever you download a file or access a web page over the Internet, a file system is involved too.įor instance, if you access a page on freeCodeCamp, your browser sends an HTTP request to freeCodeCamp's server to fetch the page. Or when you copy, edit, or delete a file, the file system handles it under the hood. :) What is a file system?Ī file system defines how files are named, stored, and retrieved from a storage device.Įvery time you open a file on your computer or smart device, your operating system uses its file system internally to load it from the storage device. But I'll sneak into the lower-level concepts as well, as long as it doesn't get boring. This post is meant to be a high-level overview of file systems. That's why I decided to write an article about it. It's a bit tricky to explain what exactly a file system is in just one sentence.

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