File system API
application programming interface
A file system API is an application programming interface through which a utility or user program requests services of a file system. An operating system may provide abstractions for accessing different file systems transparently.
Some file system APIs may also include interfaces for maintenance operations, such as creating or initializing a file system, verifying the file system for integrity, and defragmentation.
Each operating system includes the APIs needed for the file systems it supports. Microsoft Windows has file system APIs for NTFS and several FAT file systems. Linux systems can include APIs for ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, and Btrfs to name a few.
History
Some early operating systems were capable of handling only tape and disk file systems. These provided the most basic of interfaces with:
Write, read and position
More coordination such as device allocation and deallocation required the addition of:
Open and close
As file systems provided more services, more interfaces were defined:
Metadata management
File system maintenance
As additional file system types, hierarchy structure and supported media increased, additional features needed some specialized functions:
Directory management
Data structure management
Record management
Non-data operations
Multi-user systems required APIs for:
Sharing
Restricting access
Encryption
API overviews
Write, read and position
Writing user data to a file system is provided for use directly by the user program or the run-time library. The run-time library for some programming languages may provide type conversion, formatting and blocking. Some file systems provide identification of records by key and may include re-writing an existing record.
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This entry incorporates text from “File system API” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.