Files as files

From: Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com>
Date: Thu Jun 11 03:36:08 1998

On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:

> Unix started with a 14-char filename limit (and allowed [still does]
> characters in filenames tricky to get at from the shell).

That used to be one of my interview questions for Unix programmers: your
buggy program just created a filename with {control characters, leading
dash (-), leading slash (/), '*', etc} in it. How do you delete it?

Does anybody collect file systems? That would be semi-useful for somebody
doing data recovery. I have no idea what the Newton "soup", for example,
looks like. One of my favorites was the Regulus (unix-like) filesystem.
It maintained a bitmap of free blocks and could easily allocate a best-fit
contiguous region for your file (I think they had an option to creat() for
contiguity). This made file access *fast* when you needed it. I still
find fragmentation a nightmare even on Linux.

-- Doug
Received on Thu Jun 11 1998 - 03:36:08 BST