Levanta Releases Linux Management Code

The Ghost In The Machine

This (sparse file) is possible (don't know.. that's why I asked in the first place). But thinking about this seems like it would be a house-keeping nightmare to keep things straight.

Hopefully my explanation makes sense but here it goes...

Say there is a large file - "Original.txt"

Someone makes some edits to this ("Changes.txt") and saves it to disk. If I'm reading what you wrote correctly only the changed pages would be saved to disk. The rest (Original.txt) is stored elsewhere.

But here is where it gets complicated. If someone now goes and makes more edits to Original.txt you would not expect those changes to get propogated to Changes.txt. The FS would need to update Changes.txt with the initial contents of Original.txt if it were edited.

Then it gets more complicated. Changes.txt gets edited to Changes.txt' and Changes.txt' is modified and saved as Changes.txt''. If each one only had the sparse information (the changes) then a change to the original would require a "ripple effect" of changes to be applied to all the descendents from that file.

Could be done... but seems like a nightmare to keep everything straight.