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From: raj@pollux.ncgia.ucsb.edu (Richard A Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix
Subject: filesystem block size under AIX 3.1
Keywords: IBM AIX 3.1 RIOS filesystem
Message-ID: <6109@hub.ucsb.edu>
Date: 13 Aug 90 20:21:29 GMT
Sender: news@hub.ucsb.edu
Lines: 20

If you create a symlink to a file where the reference name in the symlink
is less than 48 characters long, I'm told (by people in Austin) that the info.
is stored in the inode.  However, if it's more than 48 characters long the
system allocates the smallest "block size" chunk of the filesystem for that
file.  This "smallest block size" is 4K!  This means that if you are creating
a lot of symlinks (such as symlinking the X11 distribution [the one from MIT,
not the smaller copy from IBM] for compilation of different machine types), you
can eat up disk space REAL FAST!  This is a problem!

Austin says this value can't be changed, but maybe that's because there isn't
an easy user interface which allows one to change it.  Has anyone found ANY
WAY to change the block size on and AIX filesystem?  I'm not opposed to using
adb on the raw device.  I've done such things before on other versions of Unix.

ANY info. AT ALL would be VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!

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Richard A. Johnson                           raj@topdog.ucsb.edu   (Internet)
NCGIA Computing Resources Manager                  ucbvax!ucivax!raj   (UUCP)
U. C. Santa Barbara               raj@pollux.ncgia.ucsb.edu (via Nameservers)