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12.3.4 Naming
Most long-lived data structures used by an operating system have some kind of name or identifier by which they can be referred. Obvious examples are login names, file names, device names, process IDs, and so on. How these names are constructed and managed is an important issue in system design and implementation.
Names designed for people to use are character-string names in ASCII or Unicode and are usually hierarchical. Directory paths, for example one such as /usr/ast/books/mos2/chap-12, are clearly hierarchical, indicating a series of directories to search starting at the root. URLs are also hierarchical. For example, http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/ indicates a specific machine (www) in a specific department (cs) at specific university (vu) in a specific country (nl). The part after the slash indicates a specific file on the designated machine, in this case, by convention, www/index.html in ast's home directory. Note that URLs (and DNS addresses in general, including email addresses) are ''backward,'' starting at the bottom of the tree and going up, unlike file names, which start at the top of the tree and go down. Another way of looking at this is whether the tree is written from the top starting at the left and going right or starting at the right and going left.
Often naming is done at two levels: external and internal. For example, files always have a character-string name for people to use. In addition, there is almost always an internal name that the system uses. In UNIX, the real name of a file is its i-node number; the ASCI name is not used at all internally. In fact, it is not even unique since a file may have multiple links to it. The analogous internal name in Windows 2000 is the file's index in the MFT. The job of the directory is to provide the mapping between the external name and the internal name, as shown in Fig. 12-2.
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Figure 12-2. Directories are used to map external names onto internal names.
In many cases (such as the file name example given above), the internal name is an unsigned integer that serves as an index into a kernel table. Other examples of table-index names are file descriptors in UNIX and object handles in Windows 2000. Note that neither of these has any external representation. They are strictly for use by the system and running processes. In general, using table indices for transient names that are lost when the system is rebooted is a good idea.
Operating systems often support multiple name spaces, both external and internal. For example, in Chap. 11 we looked at three external name spaces supported by Windows 2000: file names, object names, and registry names (and there is also the Active Directory name space, which we did not look at). In addition, there are innumerable internal name spaces using unsigned integers, for example, object handles, MFT entries, etc. Although the names in the external name spaces are all Unicode strings, looking up a file name in the registry will not work, just as using an MFT index in the object table will not work. In a good design, considerable thought is given to how many names spaces are needed, what the syntax of names is in each one, how they can be told apart, whether absolute and relative names exist, and so on.