*BSD News Article 9204


Return to BSD News archive

Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP
	id AA5371 ; Wed, 23 Dec 92 15:17:16 EST
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sci34hub!gary
From: gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston)
Subject: Re: Almost Free Symbolic Links (source code)
Message-ID: <1992Dec21.184856.2062@sci34hub.sci.com>
Reply-To: gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston)
Organization: SCI Systems, Inc., Huntsville, Al.
References: <39777@hoptoad.uucp> <id.J2UV.H5K@ferranti.com> <DERAADT.92Dec17125257@newt.newt.cuc.ab.ca>
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 18:48:56 GMT
Lines: 29

In article <DERAADT.92Dec17125257@newt.newt.cuc.ab.ca> deraadt@newt.cuc.ab.ca (Theo de Raadt) writes:
|In article <id.J2UV.H5K@ferranti.com> peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva) writes:
|   In article <39777@hoptoad.uucp> curt@hoptoad.uucp (Curt Mayer) writes:
|   > this cruddy but complete hack answers one of the objections to symlinks:
|   > that they are slow, and cost an entire frag. symlinks of less than length
|   > 60 are stored in the inode itself.

|   How about generalizing this to put ALL files < 60 bytes in the inode, not
|   just symlinks?

|Because it screws up the alignment all the way through the file. It's nice
|to know that going a multiple of st.st_blocksize into the file and reading
|a multiple of st.st_blocksize bytes is going to be faster.

No, he ask about *file < 60 characters*, not the *first 60 characters of 
a file*.

A damn good idea too, I think. All those little one-line shell scripts,
the 20 character files (/etc/myname comes to mind) would no longer eat
a whole block, and access time would be *much* faster.

Now, if I can just figure out why 386bsd is hanging up on an fsck with
the rll controller....

-- 
Gary Heston    SCI Systems, Inc.  gary@sci34hub.sci.com   site admin
The Chairman of the Board and the CFO speak for SCI. I'm neither.
"Data sheet: HSN-3000 Nuclear Event Detector. The [NED] senses the gamma
radiation pulse [from a] nuclear weapon." As if we wouldn't notice...