How do you find the symbolic links to files.

Dan Bernstein brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu
Mon Dec 10 12:13:43 AEST 1990


Elizabeth said that ``you have to get pretty intimate with the disk'' to
tell that a file has holes, or something like that. She concluded that
an archiver can with good conscience restore files with as many holes as
possible, hence saving as much space as possible.

Under System V this is true. Under BSD it is not.

On BSD systems st_blocks exists. I don't care what information you get
from it; the fact is that a portable BSD application may make some use
of st_blocks. (It might checksum some fields in the inode, for example.)

So an archiver that does not properly restore st_blocks on a BSD system
is broken. That's all I was trying to say. My other comments were just a
description of some tricks an archiver might use to restore st_blocks.

---Dan



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