File Systems

Directory Hierarchy in Solaris.

When you install Solaris various directories get create underneath the "/" root directory

/bin Symbolic link to /usr/bin directory

/dev Logical name of devices

/devices Files related to the devices, these are controlled by devfs

/lib Contains Shared libraries

/etc All the configuration files

/export Normally holds the end users directories

/home Default mount point for home directories

/mnt Default mount point used for temporary mount file system

/sbin Contains system administrative commands and utilities

/tmp Contains temporary files that are deleted when the system is rebooted

/usr Contains OS programs, commands

File systems

Disk Based File Systems

As name suggest these reside on hard disk,CD-ROMs, diskettes

Example : HSFS (High Sierra File System ) for CD-ROM

PCFS (PC File System )

UDF (Universal Disk Format) for DVD

UFS (Unix File System) Traditional unix file system known since BSD

Distributed File System

For accessing files stored on different server we used this.

NFS (Network File System)

Memory Based File System

These use the physical memory rather than the disk, these are also called Virtual File System, or pseudo file system.

CacheFS : Cache File System uses the local disk drives to cache the data from the slow file system

such as CD-ROM drives or network file system, to improve the performance

PROCFS (Process File System)

This is used to contain the list of active process on the system by their process ID numbers in the proc directory

TEMPFS ( Temporary File System)

When programs are executed, files are created and manipulated that may involve many reads /writes.

here the tempfs is used to improve the performance. TEMPFS is the default file system for /tmp directory.

Files in /tmp directory are deleted when the system is rebooted.

Device File System

The devfs, Device File System, manages the devices in the Solaris 10 and is mounted to /devices mount point.

Also /dev directory has symbolic links to the files in the /devices directory.

So you could access the devices through the /dev directory.