Chaos is bad by definition. To avoid chaos, we've built solid rules that must be respected. You really want to avoid chaos in a file system. Therefore, the UNIX file system comes with regulations that you cannot break if you want to use it. Once you learn this, working with it will be much simpler.
This article sets as its goals the presentation of the main traits of the UNIX file system and the explanation of a couple of tools with the help of which you can view, modify and change these traits. The tools will be UNIX commands. You can use them from inside the terminal.
You could argue that you can do the same just fine from the file viewer your UNIX-based operating system came with, like the Nautilus File Manager inside Ubuntu. This is true; however, these commands will serve you later once you learn more about UNIX/Shell programming. This will serve as a base for that and let you automate tasks later on that until now you've had to do each day, week and month manually yourself.
To round this out, let me state that this is the third part in a series of articles about UNIX/Shell programming. If you read all of them and also invest the effort to see it for yourself how this works, you will get enough knowledge to do just about anything with shell scripting, with just a little research.
In the earlier articles, I presented some general UNIX concepts and explained how to use the terminal. Therefore, at this point, you should already be familiar with these aspects and I will no longer stress them. Let us start, then, with the file system.
There are three kinds of file systems currently known and used. First, there are the hierarchical ones (UNIX, DOS). Then we have relational file systems, as is the case with WinFS. Finally, the file system can be object-oriented, as it is with Windows NT. In UNIX, we have a hierarchical structure that reminds one of a tree from the graphs. Inside this structure, we have folders and files.
