On Fri, 28 May 1999, Zhihui Zhang wrote: > > Thanks for your valuable information. This explains why I have not found > any routines in the files under /ufs/ffs and /ufs/ufs that re-organize the > on-disk image of a file in that way. If a middle part of a file is > deleted, then all the remaining part of the file must be read by an editor > (such as vi) and written out to another place before the file length is > truncated. This algorithm seems to be not very efficient. But disk is not > like memory, where we can simply modify pointers to point to new locations > easily, I guess there may be no better way to do this. If you have any > ideas about why this is not done by the filesystem itself, please let me > know. >
Because deleting the middle of a file is an relatively uncommon operation. Text editing is in the overall operation of a system not the most common application. > Thanks for your help. > > Zhihui > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > Brian Beattie | The only problem with beat...@aracnet.com | winning the rat race ... www.aracnet.com/~beattie | in the end you're still a rat To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message