Nicholas Leippe [+1 no top post!] wrote: > If what you really want to do is alter the file, then there really is no way > around moving all the data with current file systems--but you can do so with > a choice of methods, some slower, some faster. Unless, you rewrote the > filesystem to be a rope container, then it could be very trivial operation to > slice off any subset of a file. Maybe not a bad idea for some applications > (databases come to mind).
There were file systems back in the day that actually allowed truncating a file in constant time from either end, or even prepend data. I don't think any of the current, popular file systems do, because that corner case just isn't worth optimizing for. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
