Operating Systems - Unit 5

Academy - OS 5.4: Directory Structure

• 1. Definition: A directory structure is the way an operating system organizes files and folders on a storage device.

• 2. Common Types:

  • Flat Structure: All files are in a single directory. Simple but quickly becomes unmanageable.
  • Hierarchical (or Tree-Structured): Directories can contain files and other directories (subdirectories). This is the standard for all modern OSs (Linux, Windows, macOS).
    • Root Directory: The top-level directory (e.g., / in Linux, C:\ in Windows).

• 3. Connection to Practice:

  • We intentionally created a tree-structured directory for AutoCleanSE:

    autocleanse/
    ├── venv/
    ├── data/
    │   └── titanic_train.csv
    └── autocleanse.py
    

  • This is professional practice because it cleanly separates our source code (autocleanse.py), our data (data/), and our environment dependencies (venv/).

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