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A file path is called a "path" because the file system is a tree which is a graph (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It's the "path of traversal" on a graph

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[–] 27 points 4 months ago (2 children)

FWIW, not all file systems are trees

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    • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    I always thought because it leads to a destination

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

    And home is where the path starts

    Or OP is right because root is at the base of the tree

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    • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Is there a file system graph that's not a tree? Like a folder that contains a folder that contains itself?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Does object storage count? Those are usually identified by a single key; although I guess you could count cloud tenancy and buckets as “folders”

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago*

    Wouldn’t same be the case for normal files systems? I think, technically, files on disk stored as flat structure plus tree structure which tracks physical files bytes location on the disk. Is there a file system which actually stores dirs/files data as tree? Adding something into folder would mean moving data of next folder to create “room” for new stuff

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (2 children)

    I've talked before about my old idea about a tag based file system but it is purely theoretical yet afaik. Basically it is an object database where it doesn't matter how you order the relevant tags. /a/b/file and /b/a/file are the same thing.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    See the Wikipedia link in another comment about semantic filing systems seems like it is real.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Thanks!

    Starting in around 2004, a new wave of implementations centered on manual tagging of files and folders.

    Wow, this was about the time I came up with the idea. Then again it was the time of blogs and tag clouds, so...

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    • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Semantic file systems are very much not tree-shaped. The idea of a semantic file system is that files don't have a single parent or container, like a folder in a traditional hierarchical file system, and instead a file's location is represented by a combination of tags. As expected, you don't traverse a path to reach a file, but rather, you perform a query not unlike operators in a search engine.

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