On Mon Jan 16 02:40:52 EST 2012, arn...@skeeve.com wrote: > Hi. > > > What I meant was the size of the file is already given via ls(1). So > > a recursive output that make sense and fit a manipulation via join(1) > > (to combine a srv/qid) and sort and uniq etc. could do the trick. > > Not quite. On Unix (don't remember 'bout Plan 9 but I assume it's the > same) files can have holes. All you have to do is lseek pass the end of > the file and then write something. Bingo - size (or better, length of > the byte stream) no longer has a direct relationship to the number of > disk blocks occupied.
a plan 9 file server have holes as an implementation detail, but they wouldn't exist at the protocol level, and therefore d->size is still good enough. you can't seek to the end of a pipe on plan 9. - erik
