On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 11:04:08AM -0700, Randall R Schulz wrote: >Chris, > >At 10:44 2003-06-05, Christopher Faylor wrote: >>On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 05:56:05PM +0200, Markus Mauhart wrote: >>>But nevertheless send me an email in case you find out more about >>>since when typical unix/linux FSs support holes inside files ! >> >>Traditional UNIX has done this for at least 10 years. > >Jeez, Chris, I thought you were old like me.
I probably am older. >Unix (as in that quaint old piece of software written for the PDP-11 by >Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson back in the 70s) has had sparse files >(created by the simple expedient of seeking beyond the end of the file >and then writing) for much longer than 10 years. I was just going with something I knew to be incontroveribly true. I was certain that the feature had been around forever but I wasn't going to research just how long. >This capability (which was transparent and not subject to user-level >control) was present since at least version 6 of progenitor Unix, the >first I ever used, which was current ca. 1976. Only the kernel and >things like file system checkers and file system dump and restore tools >that operated directly on disk structures had to know about sparse file >allocation. Thanks for the history lesson. I thought I remembered stumbling across this feature in the 70s. cgf -- Please use the resources at cygwin.com rather than sending personal email. Special for spam email harvesters: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and be permanently blocked from mailing lists at sources.redhat.com -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
