[news.software.b] Optimizing pathalias output

terrell@musky2.MUSKINGUM.EDU (Roger Terrell) (07/21/88)

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It occurs to me that a fairly simple tweak could be made to pathalias
which would make it produce output (for smail) which consumes slightly
less space.  I notice that the name of each machine is repeated on
every line as follows:

example	mach1!mach2!mach3!mach4!example!%s	900

(example is in both the first field and the second).  It would be
easy to do something like:

example	mach1!mach2!mach3!mach4!%m!%s	900

and programs reading from the data would simply substitute the value
of the first field for %m.

It's a tiny optimization, but it will save _some_ space, and will not
noticably slow the programs that need to search the data.

--Roger

-- 

Roger Terrell
...musky2!terrell (UUCP) 
terrell@muskingum.edu (CSNet)