Provider Capabilities

CBFS keeps the common API consistent, but storage backends cannot offer identical behavior.

Capability	Local	RAM	S3
File CRUD and append/prepend	Yes	Yes	Yes
Directory operations	Yes	Yes	Object-prefix semantics
File and directory listings	Yes	Yes	Yes
getAsBinary()	Yes	Yes	Yes
upload()	Yes	No	No
stream() / streamOf()	Yes	No	No
glob()	Yes	No	Yes
Symbolic links	Yes	No	No
Unix chmod()	Yes	No-op/unsupported	No
Temporary URLs	Local URL	Not applicable	Signed URL
Persistent visibility	Filesystem	In memory	Object metadata/ACL
extendedInfo()	Yes	No	No

• Local supports uploads, Java NIO streams, symbolic links, permission checks, and extended metadata.

• RAM is useful for tests and ephemeral data, but has no local filesystem path or upload semantics.

• S3 maps files and directories to objects and prefixes. Operations are network requests and may use the provider cache.

See the Local, RAM, and S3 setup pages.