techniques to organize and store files with their data on a computer.
Questions tagged [file-systems]
99 questions
163
votes
5 answers
How to detect the encoding of a file?
On my filesystem (Windows 7) I have some text files (These are SQL script files, if that matters).
When opened with Notepad++, in the "Encoding" menu some of them are reported to have an encoding of "UCS-2 Little Endian" and some of "UTF-8 without…
Marcel
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53
votes
3 answers
What is the benefit of writing to a temp location, And then copying it to the intended destination?
I am writing an application that works with satellite images, and my boss asked me to look at some of the commercial applications, and see how they behave. I found a strange behavior and then as I was looking, I found it in other standard…
Devdatta Tengshe
- 2,514
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49
votes
9 answers
Why is filesystem preferred for logs instead of RDBMS?
Question should be clear from its title. For example Apache saves its access and error logs in files instead of RDBMS no matter on how large or small scale it is being utilized.
For RDMS we just have to write SQL queries and it will do the work…
Yasir
- 1,229
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28
votes
11 answers
Why are there so many competing filesystem designs?
Just a quick question, but why are there so many file systems still competing and in use today? (ntfs, fat32, ext3(ffs), etc)
It seems that file system designers could agree upon the best aspects of each type of system and implement a "best"…
Dark Templar
- 6,223
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26
votes
4 answers
Why is the Git .git/objects/ folder subdivided in many SHA-prefix folders?
Git internally stores objects (Blobs, trees) in the .git/objects/ folder. Each object can be referenced by a SHA1 hash that is computed from the contents of the object.
However, Objects are not stored inside the .git/objects/ folder directly.…
Qqwy
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- 4
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- 45
24
votes
1 answer
What is the name for the non-extension part of a filename?
Given the file path:
/some/path/abc.txt
The filename is "abc.txt", and extension is "txt".
What is the "industry standard", unambiguous name for the "abc" part?
For reference, in both java's older java.io and newer java.nio libraries, filename…
Bohemian
- 1,956
- 2
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18
votes
5 answers
Is it safe to convert Windows file paths to Unix file paths with a simple replace?
So for example say I had it so that all of my files will be transferred from a windows machine to a unix machine as such: C:\test\myFile.txt to {somewhere}/test/myFile.txt (drive letter is irrelevant at this point).
Currently, our utility library…
MxLDevs
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17
votes
6 answers
Is it wise to store a big lump of json on a database row
I have this project which stores product details from amazon into the database.
Just to give you an idea on how big it is:
[
{
"title": "Genetic Engineering (Opposing Viewpoints)",
"short_title": "Genetic Engineering ...",
"brand":…
Wern Ancheta
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- 17
13
votes
7 answers
Why can we not insert into files without the additional writes? (I neither mean append, nor over-write)
This occurs as a programming language independent problem to me.
I have a file with the content
aaabddd
When I want to insert C behind b then my code needs to rewrite ddd to get
aaabCddd
Why can I not just insert C at this position?
I can not do…
User
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12
votes
2 answers
Does a file system "see" the storage device as a (very large) byte array?
I want to know how does a file system write to and read from a storage device.
I think this is how it works:
A file system doesn't access the storage device directly, but rather the storage device is presented (by the device driver of the storage…
joseph_m
- 315
- 1
- 4
12
votes
3 answers
Lowercase in Linux file names
As I find that UpperCase are really readable for first letter word separation in long complex names, I tend to give some of my Linux files names with some UpperCase. Mostly executables, some directories too.
But it's been a few weeks I have remarked…
Stephane Rolland
- 596
- 1
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8
votes
4 answers
Why is Tortoise SVN case sensitive?
I've recently encountered this using TortoiseSVN, but I assume it will be the same for CVS based programs (correct me?).
Out of pure curiosity, is there any reason why the CVS filesystem is case-sensitive? I.e. the following URLS are…
Jack Smith
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8
votes
1 answer
Efficient data structure to implement fake file system
I want to implement a data structure that will hold the paths of directories, sort of fake file system.
Input:- I have a text configuration file containing the paths as follows
...
C:/temp1
C:/temp1/insideTemp1
C:/temp2/
...
I might end up…
user3054204
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8
votes
4 answers
What exactly does it mean that storing “large blobs in the database reduces performance”?
To someone who knows database internals this may be an easy question, but can someone explain in a clear way why storing large blobs (say 400 MB movies) in the database is supposed to decrease performance and what exactly does that mean? This is a…
w128
- 187
- 6
8
votes
4 answers
File shredder algorithm
As a part of learning system programming, I am looking to implement a file shredder. The simplest way (and probably seen as naive) would be to replace the data bytes with zeroes (I know OS splits the files and I'll replace bytes in all those…
Mike
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