What actually goes on into a hard disk when a folder is created?

Question

Saving files (like images or documents) writes a sequence of bits in the disk and, somehow, assign those bits to a path. But what happens when a single folder with no content is created? how is it saved in the disk?

In: Technology

Answer 1

In most filesystems, folders are also just files. So creating an empty folder is like creating an empty text document – the file exists, it has metadata, but its size is 0 until you fill it with something.

A folder on-disk can literally be as simple as a flat sequence of “(filename, location)” pairs.