On Jul 15, 2013 5:51 PM, "Lennart Poettering" mzerqung@0pointer.de wrote:
On Tue, 16.07.13 09:13, Dan Fruehauf (malkodan@gmail.com) wrote:
Well, there are certain things on Unix that are text files and many things that are not. Binary log files have a long tradition on Unix,
for
example in wtmp and utmp. We have binary files in /etc, and everywhere else.
And the reason for that being? I have no idea either, it's probably too
old
to be dug. Howver yes, I'd like these to be text based as well.
Oh, the reasons are pretty well-known for those cases. For example wtmp/utmp is binary so that utmp works nicely as sparse file and the entries may be accessed using the UID number as seek index (multipled by the fixed entry size). So, it's about indexing, exactly as for journal files. The Unix guys back then chose binary when it made sense for their immediate technical requirements. And for us it's the exact same.
I don't believe that was the reason, since when utmp was invented, Unix had 16-bit UIDs and did not have sparse files. On the other hand, I don't know the actual reason.
Eric