[londonperl] A difficult filesystem

Andy Armstrong andy at hexten.net
Wed Jun 20 21:16:03 BST 2007


On 20 Jun 2007, at 20:40, Dirk Koopman wrote:
>> Which every cpio since the ark detects and correctly deals with:-
>
> and as (IIRC) tar and cpio are now effectively the same thing, if  
> your target filesystem is big enough, you can do the other old  
> fashioned thing which is tar the old filesystem across to the new  
> one (don't forget the --exclude <mount point>) and then untar it in  
> place.

Tried that. Memory problems and it was going to take two weeks  
(literally).

> And (having just tested it) cp -a correctly transfers hard links as  
> well, but it does not do the --exclude so you end up going up your  
> mobius bottle.

Yes - but they run out of memory as I said :)

Any kind of hard link processing is going to require linkage to be  
remembered. Most tools remember it in memory - because that makes  
sense for the vast majority of cases.

The Perl program I wrote to catalogue the disk to a SQLite DB is now  
up to 44,000,000 dirents - most of which share an inode with ~30  
other dirents. And I reckon it's only about a quarter done - if that.

-- 
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net



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