Working with the Filesystem

This chapter is all about interacting with the Unix filesystem. Here, we will look at everything from the basic read and write operations to more advanced buffered operations, like token scanning and file monitoring.

All of the information for the user or the system is stored as a file in Unix, so in order to interact with the system and user data, we must interact with the filesystem.

In this chapter, we will see that there are different ways of executing read and write operations, and how each one is focused more on simplicity of the code, the memory usage of the application and its performance, as well as the speed of execution.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• File path manipulation
• Reading files
• Writing files
• Other filesystem operations
• Third-party packages