Re: File perforation.

[Eli Carter <eli.carter@inet.com>]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> I keep receiving requests from users to allow space saving by making holes 
> in files. For people using JFFS2, a compressed file system designed for use 
> on fairly small solid state storage devices, this is a fairly reasonable 
> request, and it's also fairly simple to implement. It's only the interface 
> I'm concerned about.
> 
> I've been resisting these requests because I really don't want to do it 
> with an ioctl on the file. Only if we can have a generic sys_perforate() 
> would I really want to do it.
> 
> Apparently it's hard to implement on block-based file systems. I don't 
> really care about that though -- just falling back to writing zeroes to the 
> offending range (or indeed returning -EINVAL) would be perfectly sufficient 
> until/unless it gets implemented for other file systems. All I want is an 
> interface that doesn't make me feel dirty :)
> 
> Comments? 

Could you elaborate on the difference between what you want to do and 
sparse files?

Eli
--------------------. "If it ain't broke now,
Eli Carter           \                  it will be soon." -- crypto-gram
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