Messages in this thread | ![/](/images/icornerl.gif) | | Date | Fri, 12 Dec 2003 15:04:35 +0100 | From | Jörn Engel <> | Subject | Re: Is there a "make hole" (truncate in middle) syscall? |
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On Fri, 12 December 2003 16:52:43 +0300, Vladimir Saveliev wrote: > On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 16:43, Jörn Engel wrote: > > On Fri, 12 December 2003 16:28:18 +0300, Vladimir Saveliev wrote: > > > > > > Sorry, > > > but doesn't truncate do almost exactly what "make hole" is supposed to > > > do? > > > > Yeah, *almost* exactly. Some people happen to care about the almost. > > > > I meant: where are those tons of problems (except for the fact that > "make hole" is obviously something without which one can live just > fine)?
Pretty much, yes. As hinted at before, holes are just special cases of a more general problem, block pointer handling. On my hard drive, there are literally millions of identical blocks. If the filesystem knew about those, it throw away most of them and just point to the blocks from different files (or maybe just file positions).
A hole is simply a file offset pointing to a special and very common shared block, but there are many others.
Jörn
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