On Sun, Aug 13, 2006 at 11:57:41AM -0700, Robinson Tiemuqinke wrote: > Hi, all, > > I'm a newbie to ext3 file system, but what a pity if > ext3 could not shrink after containing files and > subdirectories get deleted. > > If the ext3 directory could not shrink, then another > natural question is: can the deleted directory entries > be overwritten by new files/subdirs? The following is > an example to detail my question: Yes, of course. If a directory contains deleted directory entries, they do o fcourse get reused. So in the case where the number of files remains more or less at a steady state, ext3 will do fine. What ext3 does not currently handle is the case where someone creates 131 megabytes worth of directories (which is enough for 4-8 million files!), and then deletes them all. The directory will not shrink back down to its original size. Likewise, most modern filesystems implement on-line resizing, where the total size of the filesystem can be extended if you are using an LVM and/or RAID system, and can expand the underlying volume/partition. However, no filesystems that I know of implement an on-link shrink operation. Some have an off-line shrink operations; some don't even have that. - Ted _______________________________________________ Ext3-users mailing list Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
