On Monday 13 April 2015 16:08:44 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > On Mon, Apr 13, 2015, at 13:48, Gene Heskett wrote: > > I wonder if our "sort" utilities also do that file shrink? > > No. It is something the VFS (generic filesystem layer inside the > kernel) or filesystem itself would have to do, due to atomicity > requirements. > > > Unrelated of course, but of all the directory sorters I have written > > for a much smaller OS, one whose "dir" command presents you with an > > unsorted listing, we have dsort for cli use, and gsort for use when > > called by a gui button. Both of these basically do a bubble sort on > > the directory, which in this examnple case is itself a file, with > > the output of the sort being re-written as the sorted list, with all > > the deleted entries removed, and the directory file itself truncated > > at the end of the last valid entry. Otherwise, this file systems > > directories can grow quite large even if it does reuse the data slot > > occupied by a deleted file for a new file entry to conserve space. > > Typical way to do this in Unix (danger: NOT atomic), is to create a > new dir, move files to it in the order you want the inodes created, > then fsync+fdatasync, rmdir old, mv new old. Do that using separate > filesystems ofr new and old, and you will also defragment the files. > > I don't think XFS's defrag utility does it, because it operates at a > file/inode level an inode/file at a time. e2fsck might, though, as it > does optimize inode hashing in directories. I have no idea about > e4defrag.
I was semi-assuming that was the case for Linux, since its a decade newer than the Microware OS9 I was referrencing. Thank you for the clarification. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/201504131720.11663.ghesk...@wdtv.com