On 11/17/00 5:20 PM, "Erik J. Barzeski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> And the reason we don't zero it out is performance. It would be really slow
>> to have to zero out data whenever we created/grew files.
>>
>> Dan
>
> That data has never _been_ in a signature file. It shouldn't be _in_ the
> signature file. I don't know where it picked up the data. Sure, that data
> has existed on my hard drive, somewhere... But man... That's screwy. Cut the
> file off at the end of the signatures.
The data is _not_ in your sig file. The problem is that BBEdit opens the
entire block on your HD even though Entourage only uses part of it. This is
just the way the file system works. Let's say you had a sig file that was
33k long. Your HD only allows you to write to chunks of, say 32k, so your
sig file now spans two 32k chunks of disk space, but it's really only using
1k of the second one. The remaining 31k is going to have in it whatever was
there before (some deleted or moved file). To avoid this, you would need to
do a bunch of programming to determine what the "chunk" size was for your
particular HD, then keep track of the file size, then write zeros to the
remainder of the 32k chunk, which as Dan said would be a huge performance
hit.
The same thing happened in Word a while back, but the issue there is that
you send word docs around to other people, and if your document happened to
have its last block using a block that was previously used by your Quicken
file, then you could potentially send private data.
This is just the way the file system works -- as Dan suggested you can see
it in almost any file -- especially ones that change a lot (like prefs
files).
-Steve
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