Access Methods
Some file systems provide different access methods that specify the data to read in different ways:
- sequential access: read bytes one at a time, in order
- direct access: random access, given block/byte number
- record access: file is array of fixed- or variable-length records, read/written sequentially or randomly by record number
- indexed access: file system contains an index to a particular field of each record in a file. reads specify a value for that field, and the system finds the record through the index.