Alex Popescu wrote: > Forgive my newbie ignorance, but I am wondering why the other method > would not work? I mean it may not be very safe, > but I guess it may perform a lot better, than having to read the whole > file just to cut out the first byte.
Why would you expect that? It *might* perform better if there was a system call for removing bytes from inside a file, as that could reduce the intermediate space requirements to the size of a hard disk sector rather than the remaining size of the file (note that the time consumption would not be reduced significantly, if the remaining file has to be copied around to fill the sectors). But since that is a rather rare use case that most people would prefer being handled in a safe rather than space-optimal way, I don't see the need for such a function. Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
