mcdowell@.exlog.com (Steve McDowell) (06/11/91)
Is anyone aware of a flavor of Unix(tm) which will automatically resize a directory once files have been removed from it?? -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Steve McDowell Exploration Logging, Inc. Software Engineering Opinions expressed are, of course, my own and not Exlog's.
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (06/21/91)
>Is anyone aware of a flavor of Unix(tm) which will automatically resize a >directory once files have been removed from it?? No (which doesn't mean that none does), but I'm aware of one that, when it searches a directory when preparing to make a *new* entry in the directory, will chop off any empty blocks at the end of the directory, namely 4.3BSD. (I suspect it was easier that way; said search has to go all the way to the end of the directory anyway, but the deletion operation doesn't.) Flavors of UNIX that use that file system may do so also (SunOS 4.0[.x], while running the 4.3BSD version of the BSD file system, didn't pick that up as part of the 4.3BSDification of the UFS code; I put it in for SunOS 4.1). Flavors of UNIX with other file systems (e.g. the AIX 3.x journaling file system, the SGI Extent File System, the Veritas journaling file system, the Episode file system, etc.) may do that on those file systems - with modern pluggable-file-system UNIXes, it's more of a question of "which flavor of file system" than "which flavor of UNIX".