Virtualized Environments for the Harness Workbench

Elements for a File Structure Description At rst, the concept should be able to describe a static view of a required le structure. Therefore, the concept includes de nitions of terms or elements, which can represent le structure elements. Basic elements of a le structure are les and directories. A directory is a container, which includes a number of les and subdirectories. A directory has attributes like permissions, ownerships, a name and a location. The concept should o er a data structure, which includes all these attributes. A le is not a container. It can be seen as a leaf in the le structure tree. Technically, in Unix-type le systems a directory is not more than a le. This detail can be ignored, because the logical view is important. For this reason, a le element has the same attributes like a directory. A le has as permissions, ownerships, a name, and a location. With these two elements, the tree structure of a le system can be described. The XML dialect of the concept implements directory elements, which can include any number of le and subdirectory elements. From this abstract view, subdirectory elements are the same like directory elements, having the same attributes and can also include any le and subdirectory elements. The described elements above can be used to form a static tree structure. This tree structure describes the le structure of a virtualised environment. This section outlines, how to describe where the required les are originally located and how they can be integrated in the virtual le structure. According to the speci cations in Section 3.2.1, it should be possible to merge both, new les and local les, already used by the operating system. This saves disk space and allows arbitrary combinations.