1. CH 6: FILE SYSTEM
Prepared By: Bareen Shaikh

2. Topics
6.1 FS Model
6.2 Files and Directories
6.6 Streams
6.4 Reading and Writing Files
6.5 Reading and Writing Directories
6.6 Other File Operations

3. Introduction
 The fs module enables interacting with the file
system in a way modeled on standard POSIX
functions.
 The Node File System (fs) module can be imported
using the following syntax −
 var fs = require("fs")
 All file system operations have synchronous,
callback, and promise-based forms.

4. Synchronous vs Asynchronous
 Every method in the fs module has synchronous
as well as asynchronous forms.
 Asynchronous methods take the last parameter as
the completion function callback and the first
parameter of the callback function as error.
 It is better to use an asynchronous method instead
of a synchronous method.

5. Common use for the File System
module
 Read files:
fs.readFile()
 Create files:
fs.appendFile()
fs.open()
fs.writeFile()
 Update files:
fs.appendFile()
fs.writeFile()
 Delete files:
fs.unlink()
 Rename files:
fs.rename()

6. Synchronous Example of fs
module
var fs = require("fs");
var data = fs.readFileSync('app.js');
console.log(data.toString());
console.log("Program Ended");

7. Asynchronous Example of fs
module
var fs = require("fs");
fs.readFile('app.js', function (err, data) {
if (err) {
return console.error(err);
}
console.log(data.toString());
});
console.log("Program Ended");

8. Streams
 Streams are one of the fundamental concepts that
power Node.js applications.
 They are data-handling method and are used to read
or write input into output sequentially.
 What makes streams unique?
 Doesn’t read a file into memory all at once like
traditional way
 Streams read chunks of data piece by piece, processing
its content without keeping it all in memory.

9. Streams(continue..)
 This makes streams really powerful.
 When working with large amounts of data,
 For example
A file size can be larger than your free memory space,
making it impossible to read the whole file into the
memory in order to process it.
Let’s take a “streaming” services such as YouTube or
Netflix for example: these services don’t make you
download the video and audio feed all at once. Instead,
your browser receives the video as a continuous flow of
chunks, allowing the recipients to start watching and/or
listening almost immediately.

10. Streams(continue..)
 streams also give us the power of ‘compos ability’ in
our code.
 Designing with composability means several
components can be combined in a certain way to
produce the same type of result
 In Node.js it’s possible to compose powerful pieces
of code by piping data to and from other smaller
pieces of code, using streams.

11. Advantage of using Streams
 Streams basically provide two major advantages
compared to other data handling methods:
1. Memory efficiency: you don’t need to load large
amounts of data in memory before you are able to
process it
2. Time efficiency: it takes significantly less time to
start processing data as soon as you have it, rather
than having to wait with processing until the entire
payload has been transmitted

12. Types of Streams in NODE.js
 Writable: streams to which we can write data. For
example, fs.createWriteStream() lets you write data to a
file using streams.
 Readable: streams from which data can be read. For
example: fs.createReadStream() lets you read the
contents of a file.
 Duplex: streams that are both Readable and Writable.
For example, net.Socket
 Transform: streams that can modify or transform the
data as it is written and read. For example, in the
instance of file-compression, you can write compressed
data and read decompressed data to and from a file.

13. Types of Streams in NODE.js
 Writable: streams to which we can write data. For
example, fs.createWriteStream() lets us write data to a
file using streams.
 Readable: streams from which data can be read. For
example: fs.createReadStream() lets us read the
contents of a file.
 Duplex: streams that are both Readable and Writable.
For example, net.Socket
 Transform: streams that can modify or transform the
data as it is written and read. For example, in the
instance of file-compression, you can write compressed
data and read decompressed data to and from a file.

14. How to create a readable stream
 We first require the Readable stream, and we
initialize it.
const Stream = require('stream') ;
const readableStream = new Stream.Readable() ;
 Now that the stream is initialized, we can send
data to it:
readableStream.push('ping!');
readableStream.push('pong!');

15. Reading from a Stream
var fs = require("fs");
var data = '';
var readerStream = fs.createReadStream(‘a.txt');
readerStream.on('data', function(chunk) {
data += chunk; });
readerStream.on('end',function() {
console.log(data); });
readerStream.on('error', function(err) {
console.log(err.stack); });
console.log("Program Ended");

16. Asynchronous Iterator reading
streams
var fs=require('fs');
async function logChunks(readable) {
for await (const chunk of readable) {
console.log(chunk); }
}
const readable = fs.createReadStream( ‘a.txt',
{encoding: 'utf8'});
logChunks(readable);

17. Asynchronous iterator program
explanation:
 The stream async iterator implementation use the
‘readable’ event inside.
 We used async function because we wanted to
return a Promise.
 The best current practice is to always wrap the
content of an async function in a try/catch block
and handle errors.

18. Writable Stream
var fs = require('fs');
var readableStream = fs.createReadStream('a.txt');
var writeableStream = fs.createWriteStream('b.txt');
//readableStream.setEncoding('utf8');
readableStream.on('data', function(chunk) {
writeableStream.write(chunk);
});
writeableStream.on('finish',function() {
console.log("Writing ended");
});
writeableStream.on('error', function(err) {
console.log(err.stack);
});
console.log("writing done");

19. Writable Stream
 To write data to a writable stream you need to
call write() on the stream instance.
 The above code simply reads chunks of data from
an input stream and writes to the destination
using write().
 This function returns a boolean value indicating if
the operation was successful.
 If true, then the write was successful and you can
keep writing more data.
 If false is returned, it means something went wrong
and you can’t write anything at the moment.

20. Piping stream
 Piping is a mechanism where we provide the
output of one stream as the input to another
stream.
 It get data from one stream and to pass the output
of that stream to another stream.
 No limit on piping operations.
 Piping is used to process streamed data in multiple
steps.

21. Pipeling the data
var fs = require("fs");
var zlib = require('zlib');
// Compress the file input.txt to input.txt.gz
fs.createReadStream('input.txt')
.pipe(zlib.createGzip())
.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('input.txt.gz'));
console.log("File Compressed.");