30 Dec
2021
30 Dec
'21
9:45 a.m.
From: Bakul Shah
My guess is *not* storing a path instead of a ptr to
the inode was done
to save on memory.
More probably speed; those old disks were not fast, and on a PDP-11, disk
caches were so small that converting the path to the current directory to its
in memory inode could take a bunch of disk reads.
Every inode has a linkcount so detecting when the last
conn. is severed
not a problem.
Depends; if a directory _has_ to be empty before it can be deleted, maybe; but
if not, no. (Consider if /a/b/c/d exists, and /a/b is removed; the tree
underneath it has to be walked and the components deleted. That could take a
while...) In the general case (e.g. without the restriction to a tree), it's
basically the same problem as garbage collection in LISP.
Noel