Subject: Re: Defragmenting a NetBSD drive
To: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU>
From: Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>
List: netbsd-ports
Date: 09/16/1999 11:24:13
On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, Robert Elz wrote:

>   | Could the ffs code be made to cope with directories that get truncated
>   | from the _front_ even if that means they're technically sparse files?

It could, but this is a bad idea mainly because it means we're now
creating FFS filesystems that are not readable by other Unix systems.

> If the concern is 'rm *' then 'rm -r .' gets you the
> per process namei cache win, which is much better, so there's no win there.

Well, that doesn't help with `rm "lots of files but not all of
them"'. Would it in fact be unreasonable to modify rm--if given
more than a couple of files in a directory--to scan through the
directory once, and then sort its list of files to be removed in
directory order in order to take advantage of the per-process namei
cache?

cjs
--
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   917 532 4208   De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.
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