Hello, sorry for the late reply to this, but I was on vacation. Anything, I believe I might be able to contribute something to this discussion, which even resulted in some code.
* On Sun, Mar 20, 2005 at 11:54:32PM +0000 Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote: > OK, my conscience will let me carefully ignore NFS issues given the > pain it causes me elsewhere (and I make my mechanism switchable). > What happens if I only used the overwrite mechanism if > none of the characters being modified crossed a 512 (e.g.) byte > boundary offset in the file? Since the spaces were actually > written in a previous operation we can assume that the space > is allocated and no allocation operation is going to happen > at this point (mumble filesystem journalling mumble!). IMHO, here, you are not correct. If I write X times a char Y into a file, I cannot assume that memory for X characters has been allocated. The file system can do some optimizations, compress the file (for example, run-length encoding RLE: First character tells that X times the same character will be written, and the character itself is written afterwards), or anything else. Furthermore, think of so-called "sparse-files", which can be rather big - much bigger than your actual medium is itself. Because of this, even a block boundary in the file does not make much sense, IMHO, for the general case, that is, arbitrary file systems. Regards, Spiro. -- Spiro R. Trikaliotis http://cbm4win.sf.net/ http://www.trikaliotis.net/ http://www.viceteam.org/ _______________________________________________ Info-cvs mailing list Info-cvs@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs
