How does the Mac filesystem work?

Question

Windows works as C:/Documents and Settings/...
How does the Mac filesystem work?

Answer 1

The MAC file system is similar to what you'll find with Linux or Unix. It's called HFS.

Answer 2

There are three different file systems that have been or could be used on a SCSI or IDE internal drive of a Mac. There were several other formats that a Mac floppy disk could read/write but floppy disk is ancient history as far as Macs are concerned.

Mac OS Format (also called HFS format) was used until OS 8.1 when Apple developed a new format called Mac OS Extended Format (also called HFS Plus). Basically, although there was an overlap period until OS 9.1, Macs prior to 1998 used HFS and newer Macs use HFS Plus.

If a networked Mac has HFS format drive, its files are available for sharing with any other Mac on a network. But if an HFS format drive is installed on an internal bus in a Mac whose startup disk is HFS Plus, the files on the HFS drive will not be seen on that Mac.

For Mac OS X (and most other flavors of Unix), there is an option to format a drive for UFS (Unix File System). Apple Computer does not format drives on any computers they sell with UFS and will not give support for use of UFS format so don't format your drive this way unless you are prepared to be on your own.

Mac drives can use almost any name you choose. The pathway to, for example, my user folder, might be:
drive-name/users/my-user-name

In applications based on using Unix command line, such as Terminal or when started in single user mode, the pathway will give an errror if there is any space in a name, such as "My hard drive". So the pathway must have a \ to say "Allow the following space to be a character value rather than an argument division." Example:
My\ hard\ drive/users/my-user-name

There are a zillion other details about file system but this is how you will notice it to be different from Windows on the surface. The really important difference about Windows compared to all Unix flavors, whether Mac or Linux, is that Windows keeps a registry database of what is installed and where. That means you must be careful about deleting, moving or renaming files related to installed software on a Windows box. The registry may freak out. There is no registry as such in Unix flavors so it is not very risky to delete, move or rename files that are not in the Users, Library or System folder areas. And even many of the files in these areas can be changed if you know what you are doing. ;•)

Answer 3

Drives are not labeled with letters like in windows. They are just folders. In windows C:/ is usually the root. In a mac / is the root. If you are loooking for the equivalent folder to C:/Documents and Settings/ you would go to /home/

Answer 4

It's a hiarchy, only different. There are some inherent differences in the File System itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_systems has a good explanation.

It goes sort of like this:

/Applications
/Developer (option)
/Library
/Network
/System
/Users
/Volumes
/automount
/bin
/cores
/dev
/private
/sbin
/usr