COW fs (Re: Editing-in-place of a large file)

[VDA]

Sunday, September 02, 2001, 11:21:37 PM, Bob McElrath wrote:
BM> I would like to take an extremely large file (multi-gigabyte) and edit
BM> it by removing a chunk out of the middle.  This is easy enough by
BM> reading in the entire file and spitting it back out again, but it's
BM> hardly efficent to read in an 8GB file just to remove a 100MB segment.

BM> Is there another way to do this?

BM> Is it possible to modify the inode structure of the underlying
BM> filesystem to free blocks in the middle?  (What to do with the half-full
BM> blocks that are left?)  Has anyone written a tool to do something like
BM> this?

BM> Is there a way to do this in a filesystem-independent manner?

A COW fs is a far more useful and cool. A fs where a copy of a file
does not duplicate all blocks. Blocks get copied-on-write only when
copy of a file is written to. There could be even a fs compressor
which looks for and merges blocks with exactly same contents from
different files.

Maybe ext2/3 folks will play with this idea after ext3?

I'm planning to write a test program which will scan my ext2 fs and
report how many duplicate blocks with the same contents it sees (i.e
how many would I save with a COW fs)
-- 
Best regards,
VDA
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