Reserving Space on Disk - Enough already

[Larry McVoy]

In article <567 at hhb.UUCP> istvan at hhb.UUCP (Istvan Mohos) writes:
>Not to anger the great wizard, but the simplest solution of keeping
>"this drivel" out of comp.sources.wizards would have been a preemptive,
>authoritative answer to the first poster, about how to reserve disk
>space without writing to the disk.

Fine.  Under all versions of Unix that use anything resembling the two
generic Unix file systems, i.e. BSD and SysV, this cannot be done in any
standard fashion.

Various vendors that provide realtime Unix systems have added this capability.
Even these implementations will end up writing control information to disk.

>Because this is certainly not a "frequently asked question" and neither
>does it appear to have an obvious answer (in fact no real answers were
>forthcoming from anyone here), I for one, did think the question worthy
>of the attention of this august newsgroup.  

I too would be interested in an answer to this question.  We've seen no
answer because there is no answer.  All we're seeing is a pointless
discussion of "Do 1 big write.  No, do a lot of little writes.  No, do a
lot of lseek/write pairs."  That discussion is concerned with basic Unix
(or non-Unix, for that matter) programming issues and is not appropriate
for this group.

Try and understand that I'm not trying to be inflammatory.  I'm trying to
keep the signal to noise in the group reasonable.  It's my belief that the
people that can provide signal aren't enthralled with noise.  I, for one,
would like to keep them reading this group since I need their help from
time to time.
---
Larry McVoy, Sun Microsystems     (415) 336-7627       ...!sun!lm or lm at sun.com