Managing Filesystems
Richard A. Blum, Christine Bresnahan · 2015
This chapter discusses the different filesystem options available in the Linux world and shows how to create and manage them from the Linux command line. Linux supports several types of filesystems to manage files and folders. Each filesystem implements the virtual directory structure on storage devices using slightly different features. The chapter discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the more common filesystems used in the Linux environment. The original Linux system used a simple filesystem that mimicked the functionality of the Unix filesystem. The chapter discusses the evolution of that filesystem. It then describes the popular Linux journaling filesystems available. For filesystems, an alternative to journaling is a technique called copy-on-write (COW). The Linux LVM package provides command line commands to create logical volumes across multiple storage devices on which to build filesystems. The chapter explains the commands for interacting with filesystems from a command line environment.