Re: OT: why no file copy() libc/syscall ??

From: Timothy Miller
Date: Thu Nov 20 2003 - 15:50:01 EST




Justin Cormack wrote:
On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 19:08, Jesse Pollard wrote:

If you really want a filesystem that supports efficient copying you
probably want it to have the equivalent of COW blocks, so that a copy
just sets up a few pointers, and the copy only happens when the original
or copied files are changed.

But basically you wont get a syscall until you have a filesystem with
semantics that only maps onto this sort of operation.


This could be a problem if COW causes you to run out of space when writing to the file.

This could also be a benefit if, for whatever reason, you have lots of copies of the same file that you never change. But that sounds somewhat pointless to me.

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