🚀 go-pugleaf

On 12 Sep 89 15:41:30 GMT, esker@abaa.uucp (Lawrence Esker) said:

esker> A hard link involves the disk controller to read an extra
esker> sector that points to the real file (or is this a soft link, I
esker> sometimes confuse them).  In any case, extra disk accesses are
esker> certainly going to take more time than links.

esker> OOPS, the last line was supposed to say "... take more time
esker> than memory resident table lookup."

Either way, you're wrong.  A hard link to a file is absolutely
indistinguishable from the original file.  Both are directory entries
pointing to an inode which points to the data sectors.  With a hard
link, the directory entries point to the SAME inode.  Thus, a
hard-linked file takes EXACTLY the same amount of time to resolve as
the original file.  (Exceptions being when they arre in different
directories; a deeper-buried directory entry will, of course, take
extra time to access.)  for two files in the same directory linked
together, such as compress and uncompress, they will take the same
amount of time, while the alias lookup WOULD add time, needing not
only the single directory->inode->data resolution, but the memory
resident table lookup as well.  That is why an alias gains you nothing
over a hard-linked file in terms of speed.  And the purposes served
remain different.

Deven
--
Deven T. Corzine        Internet:  deven@rpi.edu, shadow@pawl.rpi.edu
Snail:  2151 12th St. Apt. 4, Troy, NY 12180   Phone:  (---) --none--
Bitnet:  deven@rpitsmts, userfxb6@rpitsmts     UUCP:  uunet!rpi!deven
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.