Re: inode allocation

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Andreas Dilger wrote:

>On Oct 27, 2003  19:43 +0000, Drew P. Vogel wrote:
>> Currently inodes are allocated in a way that a file created will be
>> assigned the inode of the last file removed, assuming no other files have
>> been created since the file was removed.
>>
>> In shell scrict terms, after running this:
>>
>> touch file
>> a=`stat -c %i file`
>> rm file
>> touch file
>> b=`stat -c %i file`
>>
>> $a eq $b. This makes it difficult to determine if those two files are
>> different.
>
>Doing "cp /etc/hosts file" also makes them different but keeps the same
>name and inode number.  What exactly are you trying to achieve?  In the
>rm/create case, the inode generation will be different, but that isn't
>exported via fstat - you need to do ioctl(fd, EXT2_IOC_GETVERSION, &version)
>to know that, and it still doesn't help you if the file was modified but
>not unlinked.


Given two lists of files I'm trying to determine which files are new,
removed, or modified. On ext2 there isn't a straight-foward way to
determine whether a file is modified or removed and recreated if the
removal and creation happens between the times the two lists are created.


Regards,
Drew Vogel



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