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SubjectRe: announce: ext2 compression patch
On Fri, 22 Mar 1996, Bradley L Schatz wrote:

> The pointer below is to a set of ALPHA drivers that implement on the fly
> gzip decompression in the ext2 fs. I havent done work on this for ~2
> months, but maybe people will find it useful.

I haven't looked at this, but the last few days I've been thinking about
somthing similar.

I don't know how to do it, but would it be possible to have symbolic
links to a compressed file, but accessing the link automatically
decompresses the file?

For example, you have "docs.txt.gz", and a symlink to it called
"docs.txt". Anytime you access "docs.txt", you're getting the
uncompressed version.

> Currently no support is in place to prevent writing to a compressed
> file, corrupting it.

I think this would be safer than compressing an entire filesystem, plus
the fact that these links could easily be made read-only. If this is
possible, the only real problem I can think of (with my limited
knowledge of writing system-level stuff) would be cluttered
directories. Fortunately, that'd be simple to fix: just stick the
compressed files in a different directory.

Is this doable?

> Read the details at
>
> http://www.plpk.uq.oz.au:8001/~brad/extz.html


- Mark
markd@eskimo.com (finger markd@eskimo.com for my PGP signature)



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