On 9/19/22 3:53 PM, Barry wrote:
> On 19 Sep 2022, at 06:30, Tim via users <users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2022-09-18 at 21:44 -0500, Robert Nichols wrote:
>> With a symlink, that "data" is the string that shows as the symlink
>> target. The advantage over a tiny file is that if the string is short
>> enough to fit within the inode structure, no data block on the disk
>> needs to be allocated. That's faster and more efficient than creating
>> a file since the inode needs to be set up and written in any case.
>> systemd is far from the first program to take advantage of this.
>
> Interesting. What about the old running out of inodes on a disc
> problem? How did they handle that?
I would assume that the file system is created with lots of inodes so it is never a
problem in practice.
It's a problem that crops up occasionally, and makes people wonder why they get a
"No space on filesystem" error when the df command shows that plenty of space is
available. That's why the df command has a "-i" option to report inode
usage. A filesystem that's being used for things like a news spool, which holds lots
of small files, needs to be created with more than the default allocation of inodes.
--
Bob Nichols "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
Do NOT delete it.