Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!purdue!gatech!hubcap!ncrcae!ncr-sd!ncrlnk!ncrcam!advdev!musky2!terrell
From: terrell@musky2.MUSKINGUM.EDU (Roger Terrell)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Optimizing pathalias output
Summary: Machine names shouldn't be repeated
Keywords: pathalias, output
Message-ID: <119@musky2.MUSKINGUM.EDU>
Date: 20 Jul 88 18:18:25 GMT
Reply-To: terrell@musky2.UUCP (Roger Terrell)
Organization: Muskingum College, New Concord, OH
Lines: 28


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It occurs to me that a fairly simple tweak could be made to pathalias
which would make it produce output (for smail) which consumes slightly
less space.  I notice that the name of each machine is repeated on
every line as follows:

example	mach1!mach2!mach3!mach4!example!%s	900

(example is in both the first field and the second).  It would be
easy to do something like:

example	mach1!mach2!mach3!mach4!%m!%s	900

and programs reading from the data would simply substitute the value
of the first field for %m.

It's a tiny optimization, but it will save _some_ space, and will not
noticably slow the programs that need to search the data.

--Roger

-- 

Roger Terrell
...musky2!terrell (UUCP) 
terrell@muskingum.edu (CSNet)