Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 22:03:51 -0700 From: David Schultz <das@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Inode Operations Message-ID: <20030824050351.GA13726@HAL9000.homeunix.com> In-Reply-To: <3F4828F5.8090207@acm.org> References: <3F4828F5.8090207@acm.org>
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On Sat, Aug 23, 2003, Tim Kientzle wrote: > Right now, I'm storing the full pathname of each such > file, but that is taking up a lot of memory, so I'm looking > for a more compact approach. It occurred to me that > the device number/inode (as returned by stat(2)) is another > way to uniquely identify a file. As it turns out, I need to > stat() everything anyway, so collecting such identifiers is easy. > But, I can't find any system calls that actually use this information. > > Question: Are there any system calls that allow you to > access/modify a file based only on the device number/inode number? You can't do that, and if you could, you would be able to subvert access permissions on directories that otherwise prevented you from accessing a file. Also keep in mind that it is possible to have a virtually limitless number of hard links to a file, so this isn't something that can be easily changed. Have you considered a more compact representation for your massive list of files? With a clever data structure, you should only need to store a given pathname component once.
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