| On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, khalid wrote:
> Matt J. Ingalls wrote:
> > > If you have a platform that *truly*
> > > support symbolic links, you don't have to rename your files to soundin.xx,
>
> > - could you explain this more?
>
> A symbolic link ("symlink") is a property of Unix filesystems.
> It is a file that points to the logical adress of another file.
> So what's the use?? - They are handy when you would have to
> keep several copies of the same file, f.e. when they're referen-
> ced by programs under different names, or when you want
> to have multiple identical files but you don't want to copy them
> all over again if you change one of them. They take only
> 1 "block" of the filesystem, so you could make a copy of a 10 Meg
> soundfile with just a 1K file. Nice, huh?
well this is not really exact. To be true, a symbolic link just
take the space of the pathname it contains (even nicer, huh?). The
point is that it takes one i-node (i-nodes are indexing filesystem
numbers) and the quantity of i-nodes is finite (could be, for example,
1 i-node each 1K, or 1 i-node each 4k, etc.: the quantity is decided
by the user at formatting time. Since us musicians we have biig files
all over our disks, i-node quantity is not a concern (we often use
1 i-node for tens of megs and we end up with a lot of spare ones...:-)
nicb
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nicola Bernardini
E-mail: nicb@axnet.it
Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe
the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described
with pictures.
|