A thought on symbolic links ( was utime(2) )

[Greg Bond]

In article <9789 at ucbvax.ARPA> kre at ucbvax.ARPA (Robert Elz) writes:
(Speaking of symbolic links...)
>Almost.  The owner is used to account for the space (1 block)
>used by the symbolic link in disc quota calculations.  You
>can chown() symbolic links to alter who is charged this way.
>
>Robert Elz			ucbvax!kre kre at monet.berkeley.edu

It seems a waste to allocate a whole fragment/block (2k on our system)
when most symbolic links are about 20 bytes long. A possibility would
be to set a bit in the inode to indicate the linked-to filename is
short (< 40 bytes?) & the data is contained the block pointer area of
the inode. This would allow symbolic links for ``free'', reduce
wastage, and improve the speed of symbolic links.

Perhaps this could be extended to short files also?

Yes, I know it probably isn't worth the complexity, but I'd be
interested what proportion af filesystems are taken by files less than
40 bytes. On our system this these have a utilisation of ~ (40/2000) =
2%!!

Cheerio,
Greg.
-- 
Programmers Dictionary: ``argc'' - Expression of frustration. See argv.

In-Real-Life: Gregory Bond (gnb at mullian), Electrical Engineering, Melbourne Uni
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