Compound File Binary Format

[citation needed] It also forms the basis of the Advanced Authoring Format.

[7] At its simplest, the Compound File Binary Format is a container, with little restriction on what can be stored within it.

A CFBF file structure loosely resembles a FAT filesystem.

The C-Style structure declaration below (extracted from the AAFA's Low-Level Container Specification) shows the members of the CFBF header and their purpose: When taken together as a single stream the collection of FAT sectors define the status and linkage of every sector in the file.

This area is reserved by Microsoft's COM implementation for storing byte-range locking information for concurrent access.