In computer science[citation needed], 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 filesystems, 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 systems, a number of programs (for example, awk, join, and sort) are designed to process data consisting of records (called lines) each separated by newlines, where each record may contain a number of fields separated by spaces, commas, or some other character.