Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/06/05/14:10:38
On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 11:04:08AM -0700, Randall R Schulz wrote:
>Chris,
>
>At 10:44 2003-06-05, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 05:56:05PM +0200, Markus Mauhart wrote:
>>>But nevertheless send me an email in case you find out more about
>>>since when typical unix/linux FSs support holes inside files !
>>
>>Traditional UNIX has done this for at least 10 years.
>
>Jeez, Chris, I thought you were old like me.
I probably am older.
>Unix (as in that quaint old piece of software written for the PDP-11 by
>Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson back in the 70s) has had sparse files
>(created by the simple expedient of seeking beyond the end of the file
>and then writing) for much longer than 10 years.
I was just going with something I knew to be incontroveribly true. I was
certain that the feature had been around forever but I wasn't going to
research just how long.
>This capability (which was transparent and not subject to user-level
>control) was present since at least version 6 of progenitor Unix, the
>first I ever used, which was current ca. 1976. Only the kernel and
>things like file system checkers and file system dump and restore tools
>that operated directly on disk structures had to know about sparse file
>allocation.
Thanks for the history lesson. I thought I remembered stumbling across
this feature in the 70s.
cgf
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