Re: file as a directory

[David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com>]

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Hans Reiser wrote:
| Peter Foldiak wrote:
|
|> On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 18:48, Hans Reiser wrote:
|>
|>
|>> David Masover wrote:
|>>
|>>
|>>> Speaking of which, how much speed is lost by starting up a process?
|>>>
|>>> The idea of caching is that running
|>>>
|>>> cat *; cat *; cat *; cat *; cat *
|>>>
|>>> is probably slower than
|>>>
|>>> cat * > baz; cat baz; cat baz; cat baz; cat baz; cat baz
|>>>
|>>
|>> Only for small files where the per file overhead of a read is
|>> significant.
|>>
|>
|>
|> But if the glued "file" is a stream (or pipe?) you can't do everything
|> with it (e.g. seek() ) that you could do with a proper file, right?
|>
|>
| It does not need to be a pipe-like file.  Seek can be implemented for a
| composite (glued) file.

Composite plugins are likely fairly simple (cat *) so they shouldn't be
required to implement seek on their own.  In OO terms, they should
"inherit" a more global facility, which would be based on cached pipes.

But definitely for files that are likely to be large, but still seekable
(zipfiles), you want the plugin to provide its own seek support.
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