I mean a file is fundamentally an abstraction, but it's a useful one. What that abstraction means is a bit obscure under the microscope but at a high level the

I mean a file is fundamentally an abstraction, but it's a useful one. What that abstraction means is a bit obscure under the microscope but at a high level the understanding of directories and regular files is pretty straightforward (it's streams, sockets, links, and all the other stuff that pretends to be a file in unixes that presents the problem).