This article at IBM's developerWorks website offers some insight into a few of the surprising uses of virtual filesystems (VFS). Several popular programming languages now support VFS constructs, including Java and Perl, and Tcl's filesystem is completely virtual filesystem aware and is way ahead of other languages in its VFS sophistication. The concept should especially intrigue anyone working with Linux, because so much of Linux's own character comes from the representation of devices, tables, and other objects within the UNIX filesystem. UNIX is founded on the principle that everything, or at least plenty of things, are files; VFS generalizes this to view as much as possible as a filesystem.

(Note: Linux kernel engineers also speak of VFS, but in a different sense. This article is not about the Linux virtual filesystem switch, which dispatches filesystem drivers for ext2, ext3, reiserfs, and so on.)

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