13
The File System
Sure It Corrupts Your Files,
But Look How Fast It Is!
Pretty daring of you to be storing important files on a Unix system.—Robert E. SeastromThe traditional Unix file system is a grotesque hack that, over the years,
has been enshrined as a “standard” by virtue of its widespread use. Indeed,
after years of indoctrination and brainwashing, people now accept Unix’s
flaws as desired features. It’s like a cancer victim’s immune system
enshrining the carcinoma cell as ideal because the body is so good at mak-
ing them.
Way back in the chapter “Welcome, New User” we started a list of what’s
wrong with the Unix file systems. For users, we wrote, the the most obvi-
ous failing is that the file systems don’t have version numbers and Unix
doesn’t have an “undelete” capability—two faults that combine like
sodium and water in the hands of most users.But the real faults of Unix file systems run far deeper than these two miss-
ing features. The faults are not faults of execution, but of ideology. With
Unix, we often are told that “everything is a file.” Thus, it’s not surprising
that many of Unix’s fundamental faults lie with the file system as well.