On Wednesday 08 January 2003 16:06, David Woodhouse wrote:

I've been resisting these requests because I really don't want to do
it with an ioctl on the file. Only if we can have a generic
sys_perforate() would I really want to do it.

I have heard requests for the same thing.  I would not be opposed to the 
new system call.

Apparently it's hard to implement on block-based file systems. I
don't really care about that though -- just falling back to writing
zeroes to the offending range (or indeed returning -EINVAL) would be
perfectly sufficient until/unless it gets implemented for other file
systems. All I want is an interface that doesn't make me feel dirty
:)

I don't think that it would be terribly hard to implement for 
block-based fs's.  It's basically a more general form of truncate.  Of 
course, I'm not saying it would be trivial.  Experience says that 
anything dealing with truncate is full of gotchas and corner cases.

Comments?

-- 
David Kleikamp
IBM Linux Technology Center