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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!rutgers!nike!cit-vax!mangler
From: mangler@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (System Mangler)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: are links as useful...
Message-ID: <1152@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: Mon, 10-Nov-86 04:52:10 EST
Article-I.D.: cit-vax.1152
Posted: Mon Nov 10 04:52:10 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Nov-86 00:40:21 EST
References: <145@houligan.UUCP>
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 20
Summary: most files are small; symlinks still expensive

In article <1059@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, I write:
> Symbolic links are too expensive to use freely.

In article <145@houligan.UUCP>, dave@murphy.UUCP (H. Munster) writes:
> That may be, but I've rather have a symbolic link taking up a 1k block
> than make a copy of a 10M file.

Most files aren't 10 megabytes.  Around here the average is 10K,
and the median is 1K.  Using a 1K symbolic link to point to a 1K
file sounds wasteful to me.

Half of the files on our disks haven't been accessed in a year,
but it's damnably hard to get the owners to weed them out, so I
was toying with the idea of migrating this deadwood to some slow
disk that I wouldn't back up very often.  To make this transparent
enough to be palatable, I'd have to leave symbolic links pointing
to the new location.  Imagine the expense of 40,000 symbolic links.
That kills the idea.

Don Speck   speck@vlsi.caltech.edu  {seismo,rutgers,nike}!cit-vax!speck