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From: ken@rochester.arpa (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: stupidity in directory management?
Message-ID: <646@sol.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 19-Jul-87 18:13:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: sol.646
Posted: Sun Jul 19 18:13:19 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 19-Jul-87 22:39:28 EDT
References: <603@nonvon.UUCP> <27300012@ccvaxa>
Reply-To: ken@rochester.UUCP (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 15

|What you could do would be NOT to zrch the inode in the directory entry,
|but to add a deleted bit. Deleted directory entries would be skipped
|on search, and reused as necessary, but would have the inode number.
|It might be nice to have an inode version number in the dir entry and
|the inode, that is incremented whenever a new inode is allocated.
|	Compression would be a bit of a problem - you would want to
|leave a window between unlink and directory compression, so that
|careless people like me might have a chance to unrm. Maybe done
|by a daemon, or on demand.

You don't need to modify the kernel to do this. You could rename the
file to have an "invisible" prefix, like # or ... Of course, this way
people tend to forget they are accumulating crud.

	Ken