Summary

This chapter explored the Fedora 2 filesystem in detail. In summary, the focus was on the following areas:

• Filesystem concepts and the need for a filesystem.

• The various attributes of a file, such as the types of files, ownership, permissions, access privileges, timestamps, file sizes, and filenames. We examined the differences between hard and soft links.

• Various utilities, such as find and locate , to search for files on the filesystem, and utilities, such as awk and sed , used in conjunction with xargs and the find command to search for strings in files.

• The organization of the filesystem in terms of directories, configuration files, and executables.

• Creating and formatting partitions and filesystems, and mounting filesystems on to directories on the system.

You also learned how to add a new hard disk to the system, as well as format and partition it correctly; and, finally, the topics of maintaining the filesystem by taking certain precautions were also discussed, as well as diagnosing and repairing filesystems using fsck and tuning the filesystem using tune2fs .

The next chapter takes a closer look at how Linux deals with users, groups, permissions, and related issues.