Filesystem

Everything in Linux is reachable through a single directory tree, no matter how many physical or virtual disks back it. This section covers how that tree is built and controlled.

• Disk Partitioning

  Dividing a physical or virtual disk into separate logical sections before a filesystem can be created on any of them - and the two competing partition table formats you'll run into.

• File Permissions and Ownership

  How Linux represents ownership and permission bits, and how to read and change them.

• Filesystem Types

  The on-disk format that determines how data is stored and retrieved, and why different Linux distributions default to different ones.

• Links: Hard vs. Symbolic

  Two different ways for one file to be reachable from multiple paths - a hard link shares the same underlying data, a symbolic link is just a pointer to a path.

• Mounting and fstab

  How a filesystem on a disk, partition, or network share gets attached into the single Linux directory tree, and how /etc/fstab makes that attachment happen automatically at boot.