Simplest (practical) file system?

From: Paul Williams <paul_at_frixxon.co.uk>
Date: Mon Jul 28 13:13:01 2003

Fred Cisin wrote:

> One of my hard drives was getting crowded; I was down to less than a meg
> of free space. So, I stepped on the directory of a floppy, and created
> a file that reported a size of -2147483648. Surely, if I copied a file
> with that much negative size to the drive, it would give me more free
> space! But it was unable to do the COPY.

You should've used PKZIP. If your negative length file contained only
nulls, they would compress very well, maybe down to -100 bytes or so. If
you add on the zip header information, you'd end up with a zip file with
a very small positive length (call it 200 bytes). You copy this 200-byte
file to your hard disk and unzip it to recreate the original -2GB file.

I think there are only two problems with this:

1. You won't gain anything if you're running with compression on your
hard disk.

2. My glass is empty.

- Paul
Received on Mon Jul 28 2003 - 13:13:01 BST