From: Ross Biro (bir7@leland.Stanford.EDU)
Date: 02/08/93


From: bir7@leland.Stanford.EDU (Ross Biro)
Subject: Re: Automatic compression of binaries ?
Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1993 17:27:11 GMT

In article <1993Feb8.130346.2043@black.ox.ac.uk> wa95003@oxford.ac.uk (Martin J Bligh) writes:
>There has been some discussion about compressed file systems under Linux

        With all the talk about the need for a compressed file system, I'm
suprised no-one has tried doing this.

        Set up a cron job which goes through all the standard executable
directories and compresses anything which hasn't been used for a while. It
then saves the original permisions in a file and creates a link to a special
program (which never gets' compressed.)

        When you execute the program it checks argv[0] uncompresses the
original restores it's permissions and then exec's it.

        The only proplems I see are that it will be slow and will be
another potential security problem. It will also only work on
executables, not data files or ...

Ross Biro bir7@leland.stanford.edu
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