Web services are Web-based enterprise applications that use open, XML-based standards and transport protocols to exchange data between calling clients and servers. In this paper, we demonstrate that Web services can be used to construct a distributed file system, called the Web-services-based network file system (WSNFS). One of the goals of the WSNFS is to provide a platform for file sharing among heterogeneous distributed file systems. Also, as the technology of Web services is widely applied to the field of grid computing, the proposed system can aid the deployment of Web services to the data grid applications. We present the architecture of the WSNFS and define the communication-protocol standard based on Web services. Our experiences in implementing the prototype as well as the experimental results demonstrate that the practicality of the WSNFS; the performance of the prototype is comparable to that of the Sun network file system.