Directory Structure in OS (Operating System)

What is a directory?

Directory can be defined as the listing of the related files on the disk. The directory may store some or the entire file attributes.

To get the benefit of different file systems on the different operating systems, A hard disk can be divided into the number of partitions of different sizes. The partitions are also called volumes or mini disks.

Each partition must have at least one directory in which, all the files of the partition can be listed. A directory entry is maintained for each file in the directory which stores all the information related to that file.

A directory can be viewed as a file which contains the Meta data of the bunch of files.

Every Directory supports a number of common operations on the file:

1. File Creation
2. Search for the file
3. File deletion
4. Renaming the file
5. Traversing Files
6. Listing of files