File types
We’ve already covered “regular” files, such as plaintext files or the binary data in your image files and executable programs. But there are several other file types that you’ll need to know how to recognize and work with in Linux. Whether you’re looking for the USB stick or keyboard you just plugged into your machine, creating a link that points to a file, or inspecting the network sockets that a web process has opened, you’ll want to know a bit about all of these.
Here are all of the Linux file types and what they’re used for:
- Regular file: This is the most common file type, containing text or binary data. As a software engineer, you’ll encounter regular files in nearly every programming task, whether you’re writing code, editing configuration files, or executing programs. A typical example that you might see in a long listing could be a source code file like:
-rw-r--r-- 1 dave dave...