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

From: Timothy Miller
Date: Thu Nov 20 2003 - 16:36:37 EST




Andreas Dilger wrote:
On Nov 20, 2003 15:44 -0500, Timothy Miller wrote:

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


Not much different than running out of space copying a file.

It is, though. If you run out of space copying a file, you know it when you're copying. Applications don't usually expect to get out-of-space errors while overwriting something in the middle of a file.

In effect, your free space and your used space add up to greater than the capacity of the disk. An application that checks for free space before doing something would be fooled into thinking there is more free space than there really is. How can an application find out in advance that a file that it's about to modify (without appending anything to the end) is going to need more disk space?


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