In computer science, a synthetic file system is a hierarchical interface to non-file objects that appear as if they were regular files in the tree of the disk-based filesystem. These non-file objects may be accessed with the same system calls or utility programs as regular files and directories. The common term for both regular files and the non-file objects is node.
The benefit of synthetic file systems is that well known file system semantics can be reused for a universal and easily implementable approach to interprocess communication. Clients can use such a file system to perform simple file operations on its nodes, and do not have to implement complex message encoding and passing methods and other aspects of protocol engineering. For most operations, common file utilities can be used, so even scripting is quite easy.
This is commonly known as everything is a file and is generally regarded to have originated from Unix.
Read more about Synthetic File System: Arguments For Using Synthetic Filesystems, Arguments Against Synthetic Filesystems
Famous quotes containing the words synthetic, file and/or system:
“In every philosophical school, three thinkers succeed one another in the following way: the first produces out of himself the sap and seed, the second draws it out into threads and spins a synthetic web, and the third waits in this web for the sacrificial victims that are caught in it—and tries to live off philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)