From: ronnie@lysator.liu.se (Ronnie Sahlberg) Subject: New feature for the filesystems. What do you think ? Date: 13 Apr 1993 16:53:10 GMT
Hi there.
I have been using Linux for approx. a month now, and
waouw, what a great piece of software.
But, I have one slight problem (not with Linux, but rather my
economy, I cant afford another HD just now) with HD space.
Would it not be great to be able to compress/gzip all files
on the filesystem and still have the files behave like they
were uncompressed ???
To solve this problem for me (and all others with similar HD
space problems) I have an idea for an addition to the filesystem.
o Use one bit in the inode structure to indicate that a file is compressed.
Two new commands will be made to toggle this bit on and off,
FileCompress/FileDecompress.
o The compressed files will stioll be shown to have the original size
when examining the file, although it will physically be stored in a hopefully
smaller size on the HD.
o the file will appear as being normal, i.e. without any .z or .Z suffix.
o when a user process or the kernel tries to open or read a file that is
marked as compressed, the kernel will decompress the file before the user
process or the kernel starts reading the file.
o when a file is changed to compressed status, the kernel will automatically
compress it on the HD.
o when a file is changed to uncompressed status it will be automatically
decompressed on the HD.
o obviously the kernel as well as gzip gunzip can not be compressed.
????
What do tou think of such a feature ???
Would it be possible to implement ?
ronnie@lysator.liu.se