On 14-05-08 13:42, Vijay Chauhan wrote:
i have heard the terms file I/O and block I/O. I have very basic question:- What is difference between file I/O and block I/O ?? I mean file I/O itself a block I/O, isn't it? Can anyone explain in details, i shall be highly thankful.
In most contexts, the difference would refer to a filesystem being involved (file I/O) as opposed to I/O directly from the underlying device (block I/O).
Filesystems such as an ext2, ext3, fat and so on filesystem live on an underlying block device such as /dev/hda, /dev/sda, /dev/fd0 and so on.
When people are talking about file I/O they'd be referring to reading from or writing to say /mnt/floppy/foo.txt while for example reading sectors 0 to 64 (dd if=/dev/fd0 of=foo.bin count=64) would be I/O directly on the block decvice, with no filesystem getting involved.
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