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?
Lines: 24
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <wf2W2CAt$JG0Ewur@foobar.co.uk>
References: <5ute02$9ah AT freenet-news DOT carleton DOT ca>
 <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>
NNTP-Posting-Host: chocolat.foobar.co.uk
Mime-Version: 1.0
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Precedence: bulk

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