Re: OT: why no file copy() libc/syscall ??

[Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com>]

Justin Cormack wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 19:08, Jesse Pollard wrote:

> If you really want a filesystem that supports efficient copying you
> probably want it to have the equivalent of COW blocks, so that a copy
> just sets up a few pointers, and the copy only happens when the original
> or copied files are changed.
> 
> But basically you wont get a syscall until you have a filesystem with
> semantics that only maps onto this sort of operation.


This could be a problem if COW causes you to run out of space when 
writing to the file.

This could also be a benefit if, for whatever reason, you have lots of 
copies of the same file that you never change.  But that sounds somewhat 
pointless to me.