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From: jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals
Subject: Re: How do you find the symbolic links to files.
Message-ID: <1700001@gore.com>
Date: 7 Dec 90 15:26:36 GMT
References: <4899@trantor.harris-atd.com>
Reply-To: jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore)
Organization: Gore Enterprises
Lines: 19

/ comp.unix.internals / brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) / Dec 6'90/
> > it tells you nothing about the number and location of holes
> > in the file.
>
> That's quite correct. In the article you're responding to, I wrote ``it
> can just squish the first N holes it finds, and write explicit zeros in
> the remaining zero-filled blocks.'' One might infer from this that there
> is no way to detect the locations of the holes. So what?

What's the point then?  What do you do when you restore the file to disk?
You can't assume that any one of those first N "holes" weren't really
zero-filled blocks, so you have to write zero-filled blocks to disk
everywhere.  If you're only going for space savings in the archive, you may
as well cut out all zero-filled blocks, not just the first N.  During
extraction, they all have to be filled out...

Jacob
--
Jacob Gore		Jacob@Gore.Com			boulder!gore!jacob