Linux · Files, Directories & Links

Modern distros no longer pre-create thousands of static device files at install. Which background daemon populates /dev on demand, and what is devtmpfs for?

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You add a second SATA SSD, then plug in an NVMe drive. Following the standard naming scheme, what device files does the kernel assign to each?

On an MBR-partitioned disk you create partitions but there's a gap in the numbering — the first data partition after the primary ones is /dev/sda5, not /dev/sda3. Why?

For a SATA disk the third partition is /dev/sda3, but for an NVMe SSD the first partition is /dev/nvme0n1p1. What naming rule differs?

From the Linux kernel's point of view, which two characters can never appear inside a file name — and what does that imply about names like a colon, backslash, or newline?

Two files are named report.txt and Report.txt in the same directory. On Linux, are these the same file or two different files?

A user swears their config file is gone because ls shows an empty home directory, but the file is still there. What's the most likely explanation?

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