ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Unix File System

Okay, let me try to explain the Unix file system in a way that a five-year-old can understand it.

Imagine that you have a bunch of toys scattered around your room, and you want to organize them in a way that makes them easy to find. So, you decide to put them in different drawers and label each drawer accordingly. For example, you put all the dolls in one drawer, all the toy cars in another, and so on.

Similarly, a file system is like a big drawer that holds all the files and folders in your computer. The Unix file system is a particular way of organizing all your files and folders on your computer. Like your toy drawers, Unix file system organizes files and folders by grouping them together, and each group is called a directory.

Every directory has a name, just like the drawers in your room, and every file in that directory gets its own name too. When you want to find a particular file, you can just look inside the directory where it's stored, similar to how you would look for a toy in the drawer you put it in.

Unix file system also has a special directory called the root directory. It's like the big toy drawer where you keep all your other drawers. The root directory is denoted by a forward slash (/), and all other directories are organized under it.

Now, each file and directory in Unix file system has a special set of permissions that determines who can access them. It's like how your parents might give you permission to play with some toys but not others.

So, that's what the Unix file system is like. It's just an organized way of storing files and folders on your computer, with special permissions to control who can access them.