Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 22 Mar 1996 01:12:47 -0800 (PST) | From | Mark Devlin <> | Subject | Re: announce: ext2 compression patch |
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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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