Third party posting, preallocated files.

[Peter da Silva]

Date: Mon Jul 23 23:22:34 GMT 1990
From: anarchy at tardis.computer-science.edinburgh.ac.uk

This bounced when I sent it to the originator of the question and I don't have
write access to news outside of the uk, but having seen all the junk appearing
on comp.unix.wizards could you pass this on please...


	If you want a file which is inactive, doesn't have holes in it and
	won't give you operating system hassles under unix all you need to
	do is create a partition on this disk, don't even put a normal file
	system on it.
	When you want to write data just ensure the disk is unmounted and
	dump data on it. When you need to read the data back either read the
	data from the disk interface for that partition or possibly mount
	it as a file and use it that way.
	The only thing to be careful of is not to write to a mounted partition
	if you read through the block disk handler, not the raw one for the
	partition, or if you have it mounted.

			Alan Cox
-- 
		aka. Anarchy The Cardboard Box.... the mad mudder...
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 		        ^or possibly tardis.cs.ed.ac.uk for this bit
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	Software Engineering: How to write programs if you can't
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