From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Leo Comerford Subject: Re: file as a directory Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 12:46:38 +0100 Message-ID: References: <92232506676-BeMail@cr593174-a> Reply-To: lrc1@st-and.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com In-Reply-To: <92232506676-BeMail@cr593174-a> Content-Disposition: inline List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: "Alexander G. M. Smith" Cc: sean.mcgrath@propylon.com, reiserfs-list@namesys.com, Peter.Foldiak@st-andrews.ac.uk > And then there are ReiserFS plugins, which might give you a magic > directory that when read for data, yields the concatenation of its > children's data contents. Better, you could have a little custom filesystem which can take the /(something)/concatenation/zebra: subgraph as its device and generate a single file which is the concatenation of zebra:1, zebra:2, and so on. (Remember that we can redefine 'file' as 'an atomic file or a link between files'. So since the zebra: subgraph is a file, we can mount it!) We could also have, for example, a pair of filesystems, one which can mount an XML file and present it as an instance of an XML-document association, and another which can mount such a link and present it as a flat XML file. Leo.