peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) (07/25/90)
Date: Mon Jul 23 23:22:34 GMT 1990 From: anarchy@tardis.computer-science.edinburgh.ac.uk This bounced when I sent it to the originator of the question and I don't have write access to news outside of the uk, but having seen all the junk appearing on comp.unix.wizards could you pass this on please... If you want a file which is inactive, doesn't have holes in it and won't give you operating system hassles under unix all you need to do is create a partition on this disk, don't even put a normal file system on it. When you want to write data just ensure the disk is unmounted and dump data on it. When you need to read the data back either read the data from the disk interface for that partition or possibly mount it as a file and use it that way. The only thing to be careful of is not to write to a mounted partition if you read through the block disk handler, not the raw one for the partition, or if you have it mounted. Alan Cox -- aka. Anarchy The Cardboard Box.... the mad mudder... ================================================================================ EMAIL:anarchy%tardis.cs.ed.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk anarchy%uk.ac.ed.cs.tardis@cornellc.cit.cornell.edu ^or possibly tardis.cs.ed.ac.uk for this bit ================================================================================ Software Engineering: How to write programs if you can't - Ed Djikstra ================================================================================ --