CSCI 211: File Systems

Department of Computer and Information Science
The University of Mississippi

Course Development

The course has been part of the undergraduate computer science core since the early 1980's. It was originally based on the ACM curriculum's CS5 course proposal.

For several years this course has been offered thrice per year: fall, spring, and summer. Prof. Conrad Cunningham is course coordinator and has taught the course approximately once per year for the past 6 years, most recently during the fall 1994 semester. Ms. Laurie Murphy taught the spring and summer 1995 offerings of the course and Prof. Steven Schoenly is teaching the fall 1995 offering. The material in this document is based on Prof. Cunningham's most recent offering of the course.

Source Materials

Software:

Borland Turbo Pascal. (Ms. Murphy experimented with use of C during the spring 1995 semester.)

Textbook:

Michael J. Folk and Bill Zoellick. File Structures, Second Edition. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1992.

Notes:

H. C. Cunningham. File Systems Using Turbo Pascal: Introductory Notes. UMCIS-1993-11, revised August 1994. (Retrieve gzip-compressed dvi?)

Readings:

Various journal and conference articles as appropriate.

Course Description from the Catalog

Devices and techniques for conventional file processing, sequential, hashed, and indexed organizations; language and operating system support facilities; ethics and social implications of computing; introduction to database techniques.

Prerequisites

Catalog: CSCI 112

Note: The expected prerequisite is the completion of the CSCI 111-112 sequence in this Department or the equivlalent elsewhere. These are CS1 and CS2 courses that currently use the Pascal language.

Course Goals

• To introduce the concepts and techniques for the structuring and manipulation of data on external storage devices.
• To provide students experience with the use of file structures from a programming language.

Course Outline

1. Fundamental file concepts
2. Space and time efficiency improvements
3. Simple indexing and retrieval
4. Sequential file processing
5. Tree-structured file organizations
6. Hashed file organizations

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