From:	Paul Shirley <Paul AT no DOT spam DOT please>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: The is world dropping MS-DOS. What about DJGPP? (Was Re: Quake
Date:	Fri, 12 Sep 1997 02:50:37 +0100
Organization:	wot? me?
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Distribution:	world
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	<Pine DOT SUN DOT 3 DOT 91 DOT 970911165851 DOT 13452D-100000 AT is>
Reply-To:	Paul Shirley <Paul AT chocolat DOT obvious DOT fake DOT foobar DOT co DOT uk>
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To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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In article <Pine DOT SUN DOT 3 DOT 91 DOT 970911165851 DOT 13452D-100000 AT is>, Eli Zaretskii
<eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> writes
>
>On 7 Sep 1997, Paul Derbyshire wrote:
>
>> FAT serves a becessary function, tracking which disk blocks are free and
>> which are not. It uses a bit for every block on a disk. As far as I
>> understand it, the only real problem is it takes up a fair bit of space.
>> On the other hand I can't think what the alternative could be.
>
>One alternative is the Unix-style inode filesystem, where in essence the
>table of used blocks for each file grows as the file size grows.  Any 
>book on Unix will describe the details of this.
>
>NTFS and HPFS (from NT and OS/2, respectively) are other alternatives.
>
>AFAIK, none of these waste more than 511 bytes for any given file. 

It gets better: Unix filesystems are moving to 'frags'. which allow
allocations smaller than a disk sector to be merged... I can't think of
a way to get more efficient use of space ;)

---
Paul Shirley: my email address is 'obvious'ly anti-spammed

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