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

{{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

record-oriented filesystem In computer science, a record-oriented filesystem is a file system where data is stored as collections of records. This is in contrast to a byte-oriented filesystem, where the data is treated as an unformatted stream of bytes. There are seve ...

s, a ''record'' is a basic unit of device-to-program data transfers. Files in record-oriented filesystems are structured collections of records. Records may have a fixed length or variable length. In

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix 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 Uni ...

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 A 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 ...

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

See also