The Syllable high level filesystem API

Classes
class	os::Directory
	Filesystem directory class. More...
class	os::DirIterator
	Description: More...
class	os::File
	Description: More...
class	os::FileReference
	Semi persistent reference to a file. More...
class	os::FSNode
	Lowlevel filesystem node class. More...
class	os::MemFile
	Virtual stream object. More...
class	os::NodeMonitor
	Filesystem node monitor. More...
class	os::Path
	Description: More...
class	os::RegistrarFileType
	Class to access a filetype. More...
class	os::RegistrarAppList
	Class to access the application list. More...
class	os::RegistrarManager
	Class to access the registrar server. More...
class	os::SeekableIO
	Description: More...
class	os::StreamableIO
	Description: More...
class	os::SymLink
	Symbolic link handling class. More...
class	os::TempFile
	Description: More...
class	os::Volumes
	Information about the mounted volumes. More...

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Detailed Description

This section will take you trough the Syllable highlevel filesystem API. Syllable has both a low-level API, that is mostly POSIX/ANSI compliant, and is available to both C and C++ programs. In addition, C++ programs can take advantage of the more highlevel C++ filesystem API, to get easy access to the filesystem.

This section will concentrate mostly on the highlevel C++ API. To find documentation of the lowlevel API take a look at the Syllable syscall documentation and possibly any POSIX/ANSI documentation you might have available. Since the syscall and libc functions still are very poorly documented and since many of them are compliant with the POSIX and ANSI standards I recommend locating the standard "man" pages from a BSD or Linux distribution and install them under Syllable. The "man" utility is part of the standard Syllable installation so simply adding the install location to the MANPATH environment variable will give you easy access to the documentation.

The Syllable filesystem is organised much like the UNIX filesystem. The entire filesystem has exactly one root, named "/", and all other nodes in the FS can be located by traversing from here. Since Syllable supports mounting an arbritary number of filesystems (or volumes) simultanously, a mechanism is needed to "mount" one filesystem inside another. This mechanism is called "mount points". A mount point is simply a existing directory in one of the already mounted filesystems. When a new FS is mounted on a directory, that directory will serve as the root of the new filesystem and the previous content (if any) of the mount point will be inaccessible, until the new FS is unmounted.

There are two main differences between a normal UNIX filesystem and the Syllable filesystem. The first is the virtual root-FS, the second is the virtual device-FS. The root directory in AtheOS is not located on a regular filesystem and it's not persistant during reboots. The root-FS is only backed in RAM and only support directories (used as mount points) and symlinks. The boot-FS is mounted as /boot/ and most of the time the FS is accessed through a set of symlinks created in the root by the bootup scripts. Normally extra volumes are also mounted in this virtual root-FS. The virtual device-FS is mounted as /dev/ and controls the AtheOS device drivers. The device-FS can be hierarchial to categorice the device drivers. All nodes inside the device-FS are created by the kernel itself on request from the device-drivers.

NOTE: Throughout this documentation the name "file" might be used on any nodes located in the FS, so a "file" might not be a regular file but can also be a directory or symlink depending on the context where the name is used.

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