Re: announce: ext2 compression patch

Tycho Fruru (Tycho.Fruru@cs.kuleuven.ac.be)
Sat, 23 Mar 1996 07:57:53 +0100 (MET)


On Fri, 22 Mar 1996, Mark Devlin wrote:

> I don't know how to do it, but would it be possible to have symbolic
> links to a compressed file, but accessing the link automatically
> decompresses the file?
>
> For example, you have "docs.txt.gz", and a symlink to it called
> "docs.txt". Anytime you access "docs.txt", you're getting the
> uncompressed version.
>
> I think this would be safer than compressing an entire filesystem, plus
> the fact that these links could easily be made read-only. If this is
> possible, the only real problem I can think of (with my limited
> knowledge of writing system-level stuff) would be cluttered
> directories.
If you just gzip the whole file, the most important problem will be random
access to that file. I don't want the computer to decompress a
multi-megabyte file just to read the last few characters.
This problem can be remedied by not gzip'ing the whole file in one piece,
but splitting it (internally) in chunks which can be gzip'ed
independently. That way, the penalty for random access is a lot lower
(but the compression ratio will drop a bit)

----
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