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This article was an epiphany for me because I realized I've been thinking of the Unix filesystem as if it has two functions: read_file and write_file. (And then
by MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
This article was an epiphany for me because I realized I've been thinking of the Unix filesystem as if it has two functions: read_file and write_file. (And then getting frustrated with the filesystem APIs in programming languages.)
- markhahn 3y agoSo you came from an S3 or other put-get world, and found actual filesystems odd? I suppose that's not so different from a WMP user's epiphany when they discover processes, shells, etc.
- MatthiasPortzel 3y agoWell I’m used to an application-level view of the file system. A document editor or text editor opens files and saves files, but these are whole-document operations. I can’t open a document in Sublime Text without reading it, and I can’t save part of a file without saving all of it. So it’s not obvious that these would be different at an OS level. As the post points out, there are uses for Unix’s sub-file-level read-and-write commands, but I’ve never needed them.