Re: ext2fs: do directories ever shrink?

Alex Buell (alex.buell@tahallah.demon.co.uk)
Mon, 13 Jul 1998 14:57:37 +0000


Clifford Wolf wrote:

> A general behaviour with UNIX files is that a file can never shrink! A
> file can be trucated - but it can shrink e.g. from 10 bytes to 5. Since
> a directory is just a file it can't shrink too (except the implementation
> contains additional code for it).

I don't understand this; are you saying that files can shrink or not?
What on earth does the directory as a file fills up with anyway? [The
largest directory size I've seen is 40,000 blocks for a directory filled
up with images and then these images were deleted!) Clearly there is a
benefit of reclaiming this - any chance the fsck process can
automatically reclaim this on reboots?

Cheers,
Alex.

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