File Systems

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NTFS provides Portable Operating System Interface for UNIX (POSIX) compliance, which permits UNIX programs to be ported to Windows 2000. Windows 2000 is fully compliant with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) standard 1003.1, which is a standard for file naming and identification.

The following POSIX-compliant features are included in NTFS:

  • Case-sensitive naming. For example, POSIX interprets README.TXT, Readme.txt, and readme.txt as separate files.

  • Hard links. A file can have more than one name. This allows two different file names, which can be in different folders, to point to the same data.

  • Additional time stamps. These show when the file was last accessed or modified.

caution-icon

Caution

You must use POSIX-based programs to manage file names that differ only in case. You cannot use standard Windows 2000 command-line tools (such as copy , del , and move , or their equivalents in Windows Explorer) to manage file names that differ only in case. For example, if you type del MyDoc.Doc at the command prompt, both mydoc.doc and MyDoc.Doc are deleted.