Re: AW: [gentoo-user] [OT] Why directories aren't files?

[Matteo Pillon <matteo.pillon@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 18, 2006 at 11:49:38AM +0200, Noack, Sebastian wrote:
> But independent from this aspect, a file refers in its inode to a
> chunk of storage on the hard disk (or other storage medias), which
> contains its data. But some files like directories don't contain data.

A directory IS like a file (in my opinion), it's an inode with
data, you can also see it doing an ls -l:
drwxr-xr-x  2 pmatthew users  4096 27 dic  2005 a
drwxr-xr-x  2 pmatthew users 40960 22 mar 16:20 b
Directory 'a' shows a size of 4096, the block size, as it contains
only a few files and listing them with their associated inode, needs
only a block, but 'b' contains a lot of files and so needs 10 blocks
to store the inode-filename list.

I don't have much knoledge of how ext2 works under the hood, just
guessing from the behaviour I see from higher-level tools.

Thanks for your replies.

Bye.

-- 
 * Pillon Matteo
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