are links as useful...

[System Mangler]

In article <1059 at cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, I write:
> Symbolic links are too expensive to use freely.

In article <145 at houligan.UUCP>, dave at murphy.UUCP (H. Munster) writes:
> That may be, but I've rather have a symbolic link taking up a 1k block
> than make a copy of a 10M file.

Most files aren't 10 megabytes.  Around here the average is 10K,
and the median is 1K.  Using a 1K symbolic link to point to a 1K
file sounds wasteful to me.

Half of the files on our disks haven't been accessed in a year,
but it's damnably hard to get the owners to weed them out, so I
was toying with the idea of migrating this deadwood to some slow
disk that I wouldn't back up very often.  To make this transparent
enough to be palatable, I'd have to leave symbolic links pointing
to the new location.  Imagine the expense of 40,000 symbolic links.
That kills the idea.

Don Speck   speck at vlsi.caltech.edu  {seismo,rutgers,nike}!cit-vax!speck