In my quest to understand inodes and why they are, I am got that it was a Unix thing and that the . and .. links are some artifacts of it. In using an old 386 PC with MS-DOS 6.22, I also find these (hard?) links where the file system is FAT16, so why are these present? Of course they are useful but I am asking about why they were brought to FAT16 from whatever file system Unix was using?
In: Technology
Early MS-DOS / QDOS copied a load of stuff from CP/M. And CP/M was somewhat inspired by Unix. I think that’s about as complex as it gets.
Implementation is different though. In Unix . and .. are part of the filesystem and in some early / buggy versions can even be deleted. In MS-DOS they’re part of the shell.
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