On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:23:22AM -0600, postid wrote: > Greetings: > > Thank you all for your explanations and patience. I've done some more > reading, though I'm not sure that I completely understand. > > Here's what I think I'm hearing: When I look at a directory I'm looking > at a file system, not necessarily a list of physical locations. But on > the other hand, the partitions are specific-sized containers where parts > of the file system reside. The file system directory is a like an address > book listing the members of a family in a genealogical tree and > indicating how they're tied into the system in a heirarchically connected > telephone conference call. The partitions are their actual locations (the > homes where they reside at a physical address). Am I understanding that > correctly or am I still not getting it?
I think you're complicating things too much. Let's go back to what's common between Windows and linux, and let's assume that your partitions are formatted (ie, have a file system on them). If you look at a single partition, Linux and Windows have the same view on it: it's a tree. There is the top-level directory (the root), which has directories and files as children. Each such directory child can have further children, which in turn may be files or directories, and so on. There is no difference between Windows and linux here. The difference comes with how it is all tied together. In Windows, once you have a collection of partitions, each with its own tree, there is no way really to make this forest into a single tree. Windows explicitly keeps track of the set of roots of these trees, namely C:\, D:\, ... In linux, on the other hand, the system really can only work with one big tree. If you have multiple partitions, you get this tree by gluing the trees of the different partitions together. This is what mounting does. You have your tree corresponding to your / partition. Then you identify a directory node in this tree, say the one representing /usr and attach the root of the tree representing your /usr partition to it, and so on until you have assembled all the trees living on the different partitions into one big tree. (Technically, you are not attaching the root to the /usr node, but you identify them, but this may only add to the confusion here.) In principle, you have complete freedom to choose where to mount the different partitions, but of course you have to make sure that system files live where they should (eg, binaries in /bin, /usr/bin, etc.) Now, once you've assembled your tree in this fashion, you can essentially forget about the fact that it is in fact built from smaller subtrees that live on different partitions. The only reason why this isn't entirely true is that adding a file in a directory that belongs to a node on a given partition creates that file on that partition, and you better have enough space to do this. Cheers, Norbert -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
