file access method it indicates whether the records in file can be accessed sequentially or randomly in sequential access moderecords are read one by one that isif records of students are stored in the student filethen to read the record of th studentyou have to go through the record of the first students howeverin random accessrecords can be accessed in any order attributes flag file can have six additional attributes attached to it these attributes are usually stored in single bytewith each bit representing specific attribute if particular table attribute flag bit is set to ' then this means that the corresponding attribute is turned on table shows the list of attributes and their position attribute attribute byte in the attribute flag or attribute byte read-only hidden if system file is set as hidden and read-onlythen its attribute system byte can be given as we will discuss all these attributes volume label here in this section note that the directory is treated as special directory file in the operating system soall these attributes are applicable archive to files as well as to directories read-only file marked as read-only cannot be deleted or modified for exampleif an attempt is made to either delete or modify read-only filethen message 'access deniedis displayed on the screen hidden file marked as hidden is not displayed in the directory listing system file marked as system file indicates that it is an important file used by the system and should not be altered or removed from the disk in essenceit is like 'more seriousread-only flag volume label every disk volume is assigned label for identification the label can be assigned at the time of formatting the disk or later through various tools such as the dos command label directory in directory listingthe files and sub-directories of the current directory are differentiated by directory-bit this means that the files that have the directory-bit turned on are actually sub-directories containing one or more files archive the archive bit is used as communication link between programs that modify files and those that are used for backing up files most backup programs allow the user to do an incremental backup incremental backup selects only those files for backup which have been modified since the last backup when the backup program takes the backup of fileor in other wordswhen the program archives the fileit clears the archive bit (sets it to zerosubsequentlyif any program modifies the fileit turns on the archive bit (sets it to thuswhenever the backup program is runit checks the archive bit to know whether the file has been modified since its last run the backup program will archive only those files which were modified text and binary files text filealso known as flat file or an ascii fileis structured as sequence of lines of alphabetnumeralsspecial charactersetc howeverthe data in text filewhether numeric or non-numericis stored using its corresponding ascii code the end of text file is often denoted by placing special charactercalled an end-of-file markerafter the last line in the text file binary file contains any type of data encoded in binary form for computer storage and processing purposes binary file can contain text that is not broken up into lines binary file stores data in format that is similar to the format in which the data is stored in the main memory