There are three different kinds of CDS entries that are of significance to application programmers, as follows:
· Object
· Soft link
· Directory
The object entries are the most primitive form. These are where data is stored. Directory entries contain other entries (that is, can have children) just like UNIX file system directories. Soft link entries are essentially alias names for other directory or object entries. Only object entries can be created by applications; soft links and directories have to be created and manipulated with the cdscp command.
Thus, any CDS entry is defined as a directory, a soft link, or an object entry by the presence of a certain combination of attributes belonging to that kind of entry. You can use the cdscp command to get a display of all the attributes of any CDS entry.
The term attribute as applied to namespace entry objects has roughly the same meaning in CDS and GDS. The main difference is that CDS does not restrict or control the combinations of attributes attached to entries written in its namespace.