rosenkra@Alliant.COM (Bill Rosenkranz) (08/26/88)
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i've been thinking about this for a couple of hours now and thought i'd run
it past you avid readers...
i am considering changing my hacked up {open,read,close,...}dir routines
to make them faster. i currently use Fs{first,next} but these seem slow.
another alternative is to read the FAT tables directly (crude but fast).
what i thought about was using a unix-like scheme to write a (hidden) file
in each dir containing the dirent struct for each file. the files would
be standalone and should not impact any other access scheme provided, of
course, they have unique names. unix uses "." and ".." but this is out
on the ST (perhaps "dot_____.___" and "dotdot__.___" ?). now it just becomes
a task of creating a modified set of utilities (rm, cp, ls, mv, etc) or
better yet lib functions (open/creat, fopen, rename, mkdir, etc) which
update these hidden files. the dot file would be a multiple of 512 bytes
in size, made larger/smaller as needed when entries were added/removed.
has anybody ever tried this or should i just wait for minix (a "real" ufs)?
-bill