Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 25 Jun 1999 12:13:05 -0400 (EDT) | Subject | Re: bottom-up mtimes (was Re: (reiserfs) Re: I discussed reading . . .) | From | (Kragen Sitaker) |
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Somebody wrote: > Next [for W2K emulation] files need to be able to inherit stat data, so > that a file can share its modification time with its parent > directory, so that modifying the file changes the mod time on the > directory.
This opens some interesting possibilities: - updatedb need only run on directories that have been changed; - more-sophisticated versions of updatedb (full-text indexing? stat data?) could become feasible to update rapidly; - locate could manually search directories that are newer than updatedb's last run, meaning locate could give correct results - find could be implemented in terms of locate (except for -atime) - so find would run in time proportional to the number of files you had updated since the last updatedb, instead of time proportional to the number of files on your disk. This is likely to be even more useful as filesystems expand from millions of files to hundreds of millions of files (if reiserfs takes off).
. . . of course this would require that the mtime updates happen recursively, all the way down to the root of the filesystem.
I believe NT 4 does this already.
. . .but it breaks Unix semantics. So it shouldn't be the mtime, except possibly for certain particular cases.
-- <kragen@pobox.com> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> According to my medieval text in the seventh century a finalizer raised a dead object named Gorth who infected every computer in Cappidocia ending Roman rule in the region. -- Charles Fiterman on gclist@iecc.com
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