On Tue, Sep 1, 2020, 8:05 AM Greg Wooledge <wool...@eeg.ccf.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 10:29:55AM +0200, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > [1] Why people keep insisting in calling those things "folders" is
> > beyond me. They don't "fold" anything, do they?
>
> It's a Microsoft Windows thing. Windows presents directories and
> files graphically, and the icon for a directory is a picture of a manila
> folder. Then to make matters worse, they use the word "folder" in
> their menus and so on ("New Folder").
>
> So you've got multiple generations of people who grew up learning things
> The Windows Way. Whenever you see someone on this mailing list who
> top-quotes, and calls directories "folders", it's a safe bet they were
> raised on Windows.
>
> Very few people, even veteran Unix/Linux users, actually know where
> the word "directory" comes from. See, originally, a directory in a
> Unix file system was just a tabular list of filenames and inode numbers,
> like so:
>
> foo.txt 6890
> bar.c 774
> bar.h 775
> Makefile 4583
>
> Of course, the numbers were encoded in binary, not ASCII, and there
> were no newlines afer them, and the filenames weren't space-padded...
> but you get the point, I hope. That's basically what a directory
> looked like, and for a long time, you could cat one and actually *see*
> it. (You can't any more. The kernel and libc forbid it now.)
>
> It's called a directory because it works and looks exactly like a
> telephone directory. You look up a name in the directory to get its
> inode number, so you can access the data within the file system.
> (And telephone directories are called that because the word "direction"
> is an antiquated synoym for "address". Directory literally means
> "address book" or "address list".)
>
> If multiple directories have entries with the same inode number, then
> they both refer to the same file. That's how "hard links" work. A
> field inside the inode keeps track of how many links are believed to
> exist to each inode, so the file system can determine when it's safe
> to reallocate the file's storage space. That reference count is displayed
> by "ls -l". It's the number following the permissions.
>
> Now, try to imagine what happens when people who grew up with the
> knowledge of how Unix directories actually work meet up with people
> who grew up thinking you open a folder by clicking on it with a mouse.
>
> You don't even have to imagine it -- it's happening all around you.
>
Directories go back, even before Windows: The MSDOS Equivalent to ls is
dir, which I "guess" means "List Directory".
Ah yes, the "Good old days".
Kenneth Parker
