On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 01:14:25 +0200, Gunnar Ritter wrote: > Having a separate S_IFXXX type for streamed files would also give > attention to portability issues easily. It might in fact be better > to have existing applications fail explicitly with them than to > make this as transparent as possible, but hope for good luck. > > Utilities like 'tar' would just say 'Unknown file type' or the like > and exclude such files from the archives they create. This would lead > the user's explicit attention to the data loss. He might then choose > to ignore the error, or to get a special version of 'tar' to handle it. > > It would also be clear to programmers and users that such files are > special things they don't normally need. Regular Linux installations > might totally ignore them. If streamed files are only intended for > use with CIFS or other special cases, that might be a more clean > solution for this issue than watering down the existing portable > file semantics. You could actually use two S_IFXXX types - one for stream files which should be archived by backup programs because they contain real information, and a different one for stream files which should not be archived because they are merely a different "view" of data from the main file. This simplifies the archival problem because legacy programs would complain that the file types aren't handled - alerting the user to potential data loss, and updated programs would automatically backup only the attributes that are required. -- -Julian Blake Kongslie