Fileshark
Sarah Diesburg, Andrew D. Berns · 2020
The file system is a critical and ubiquitous part of our operating systems, yet it is often poorly understood. While many undergraduate students studying computer science learn the fundamentals of operating systems, they can often find it difficult to fully comprehend how a file system works. This difficulty may be in part because the true workings of a file system are hidden from the user, and so any coverage of its operation was done, by necessity, in the abstract. To address this, we have created a tool which visualizes the operations of the file system in situ, much like Wireshark provides information on what is happening on a network. Our tool, named Fileshark, provides an easy-to-use interface for visualizing the processes involved in reading, storing, and deleting data. Our tool can aid in the teaching of operating systems, computer forensics, and common concepts like transactions that are also found in other domains (e.g. databases and distributed systems).