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From: goudreau@larrybud.rtp.dg.com (Bob Goudreau)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals
Subject: Re: How do you find the symbolic links to files.
Message-ID: <1990Dec19.175844.22784@dg-rtp.dg.com>
Date: 19 Dec 90 17:58:44 GMT
References: <1990Dec12.235535.29083@erg.sri.com> <114453@uunet.UU.NET> <7919:Dec1622:19:3490@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <114818@uunet.UU.NET>
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In article <114818@uunet.UU.NET>, rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes:
>
> I agree that a system call to allocate a big chunk of disk would be
> nice.  Your example about a music program is well taken. It would
> also be nice if truncate would deallocate space in the middle of a
> file.

Indeed, the latter is already available in V.4 via the F_FREESP command
to fcntl(), which allows you to punch holes of arbitrary size at
arbitrary locations in a file.  Undocumented and so far unimplemented,
but hinted at in the code, is the corresponding F_ALLOCSP command that
would allow the opposite.  Neither F_FREESP or F_ALLOCSP appear yet in
the SVID or any other standard, but we can hope that they (or
equivalent functionality) will eventually be standardized.

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