File management system incorporating soft link data to access stored

Abstract

A file management system has a disk access unit for converting the relative position of a block in a file system into a physical position and accessing data at the position on a disk. The file management system includes a file entity operation unit, a file system manager access unit, and a file management table access unit. The file entity operation unit updates free block data in the file system when creating and deleting a file entity. The file system manager access unit lets the file entity operation unit work with no regard to the medium structure of a file system manager of the file system. The file management table access unit has an entry operation unit for allocating and releasing file management table entries and an entry access unit for referring to and updating the contents of the file management table entries. The entry access unit has a function of extracting soft link data out of any one of the file management table entries. The file management system allocates no data storage block to the soft link data, to thereby improve the space efficiency of the file system. The file management system refers to the contents of the symbolic link without referring to a data storage area of the file system, to thereby decrease the number of I/O operations during a pathname resolution process by the number of symbolic links contained in a path name to be solved.