What is the Linux file system called?
 

Microsoft has FAT and NTFS. What does Linux (or Unix) have?

I hope this isn't a stupid question but I looked all over the net and couldn't find an answer. Unless it's called the FHS File Heirarchy System?

Thanks for any help :)

There are a bunch of different file systems linux can use.

The most popular are ext2 (Extended File System 2), ext3 (all the features of ext2 with journaling), and reiserfs (another journaling file system with very good performance). Ext3 is probably the default on most systems these days as it provides data stability over ext2 with little to no negatives.

They are by no means the only three though. It also supports JFS (IBM's journaling file system), XFS (the file system fron SGI's Irix OS), and many many more that probably aren't so suitable for using for your actual system disks.

If you log on to your system as root and type mount with no arguements it will print out a list of all mounted file systems and what types they are.

For more information check out The Linux Documentation Project's Filesystem Howto.

There are several filesystems but the common ones are ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs. The last four are journaling filesystems.
Now you have something to google on.

Hey thanks a lot guys for the quick and informative replies. seems like a comprehensive possibility of file systems! I'm guessing Red Hat 9 would be ext3? I'll try that 'mount' command you mentioned earlier the next time I'm at college.

Thanks again! :)

Think ext3 very hard to recover deleted files, in comparison with ext2??

I don't know that it should be, the file storage mechanism hasn't changed at all. But I suppose it is possible they do more cleanup when a file gets unlinked in ext3.

Most modern distros seem to default to reiserfs except Redhat and derivatives. In RHEL reiserfs support is not even compiled into the kernel.

Just like Windows .. :eek: .. Linux supports several different types of filesystems. Support for a filesystem is provided by the kernel, through resident software that is built-in to the kernel or through loadable kernel-modules, or both.

(In Windows, the analog feature is called IFS = Installable File Systems.)

ext3 is probably the most commonly used system. It's based on "ext2" but also has journaling, which allows it to recover very quickly from errors if the system crashes.

ReiserFS is gaining popularity because it stores "thousands of very small files" very efficiently... and in an awful lot of practical situations, that is what we are usually dealing with. It also supports journaling.

CD-ROMs and other external media commonly use other filesystems that may only be found on these types of devices.