Files
lix/doc/manual/src/architecture/file-system-object.md
T
Jade Lovelace 748d8310fa Fix the pages in the manual for Lix
This doesn't comprehensively fix everything outdated in the manual, or
make the manual greatly better, but it does note down where at least
jade noticed it was wrong, and it does fix all the instances of
referencing Nix to conform to the style guide to the best of our
ability.

A lot of things have been commented out for being wrong, and there are
three types of FIXME introduced:

- FIXME(Lix): generically Lix needs to fix it
- FIXME(Qyriad): re https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/215
- FIXME(meson): docs got outdated by meson changes and need rewriting

I did fix a bunch of it that I could, but there could certainly be
mistakes and this is definitely just an incremental improvement.

Fixes: https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/266
Change-Id: I5993c4603d7f026a887089fce77db08394362135
2024-05-05 16:11:01 -07:00

1.5 KiB

File System Object

Nix implementations use a simplified model of the file system, which consists of file system objects. Every file system object is one of the following:

  • File

    • A possibly empty sequence of bytes for contents
    • A single boolean representing the executable permission
  • Directory

    Mapping of names to child file system objects

  • Symbolic link

    An arbitrary string. Nix implementations do not assign any semantics to symbolic links.

File system objects and their children form a tree. A bare file or symlink can be a root file system object.

Nix does not encode any other file system notions such as hard links, permissions, timestamps, or other metadata.

Examples of file system objects

A plain file:

50 B, executable: false

An executable file:

122 KB, executable: true

A symlink:

-> /usr/bin/sh

A directory with contents:

├── bin
│   └── hello: 35 KB, executable: true
└── share
    ├── info
    │   └── hello.info: 36 KB, executable: false
    └── man
        └── man1
            └── hello.1.gz: 790 B, executable: false

A directory that contains a symlink and other directories:

├── bin -> share/go/bin
├── nix-support/
└── share/