On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 09:08:12AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > i'm reading some documentation that claims that neither ext3 device > files nor symlinks cost you any data blocks in the filesystem. sure, > that's obvious with device files, but symlinks? > > i always thought that symlinks cost you a single data block -- just > enough to store the actual character value of the file being linked > to. the only way i could see that not being true was if the ext3 > inode allocated some space internally to hold that information for > suitably short filenames, but i've perused the ext3_inode structure in > include/linux/ext3_fs.h and i don't see that unless i'm just missing > it. > > thoughts? can anyone clarify this? thanks.
Most if not all classic Unix filesystems I know store the destination of the symlink directly in the inode itself, usually in the space that is normally used for the block list (direct, indirect, double indirect and triple indirect blocks). If the destination name is longer than the required space, they will allocate a data block for it instead. Erik -- Erik Mouw -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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