computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

{{citation needed, date=July 2016, a storage record is: * A group of related data, words, or fields treated as a meaningful unit; for instance, a Name, Address, and Telephone Number can be a "Personal Record". * A self-contained collection of information about a single object; a record is made up of a number of distinct items, called fields. * In IBM mainframes, a ''record'' is a basic unit of device-to-program data transfers. Mainframe files, properly called

data sets A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more table (database), database tables, where every column (database), column of a table represents a particular Variable (computer scienc ...

, are traditionally structured collections of records, as opposed to modern byte stream access files. Records may have a fixed length or variable length. In

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

systems, a number of programs (for example, awk, join, and sort) are designed to process data consisting of records (called lines) each separated by

newline Newline (frequently called line ending, end of line (EOL), next line (NEL) or line break) is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or a ...

s, where each record may contain a number of fields separated by spaces, commas, or some other character.

See also