Question

I’m working on simple class something like “in memory linux-like filesystem” for educational purposes. Files will be as StringIO objects. I can’t make decision how to implement files-folders hierarchy type in Python. I’m thinking about using list of objects with fields: type, name, parent what else? Maybe I should look for trees and graphs.

Update:

There will be these methods:

new_dir(path),
dir_list(path),
is_file(path),
is_dir(path), remove(path),
read(file_descr),
file_descr open(file_path, mode=w|r),
close(file_descr),
write(file_descr, str)

Answer 1

It’s perfectly possible to represent a tree as a nested set of lists. However, since entries are typically indexed by name, and a directory is generally considered to be unordered, nested dictionaries would make many operations faster and easier to write.

I wouldn’t store the parent for each entry though, that’s implicit from its position in the hierarchy.

Also, if you want your virtual file system to efficiently support hard links, you need to separate a file’s contents from the directory hierarchy. That way, you can re-use the contents by giving each piece of content any number of names, which is what hard linking does.