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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Unix file systems (UFS, SVFS, EFS....)?
Message-ID: <14013@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 4 Oct 90 08:51:50 GMT
References: <25866.27091187@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 19

In article <25866.27091187@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> brownrigg@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>What is the origin of this file system?

SGI came up with EFS on their own, although there are similar extent-
based filesystems available from other vendors of UNIXy systems.

>What is the "predominant" file system on the plethora of Unix boxes
>out there (i.e, is there an emerging concensus about which way to go)?

More and more, some sort of network access is becoming dominant on
"real" computers (as opposed to IBM PCs).  NFS certainly has the
lead there, despite its many deficiencies.

The kernel is supposed to handle accessing different types of filesystem
for your application, so it shouldn't really matter what kind exists.
I suspect the problem you reported was due to the application trying to
interpret the contents of a directory itself instead of relying on the
getdents() system call to fetch entries from a directory (typically done
through use of opendir()/readdir()/etc.).