lab 17.2 doubt

donquijotedelasnubes

Hi there,

I have a doubt about the lab 17.2 where we are asked to partition a Disk Image File.

The doubt I have is: how does the fdisk utility recognizes that "imagefile" is (or could be) a disk. Since it is not mounted, the only thing that could indicate to the system that it is in fact a disk, is that it has a file system created on it. I also created another file, out of curiosity, and I didn't create a file system on it, and I can also do the same operations as requested on the lab.

So my question really is, that one could partition any file?
how does the fdisk utility even know what is that it is partitioning?