Re: A bad loop in settrans

[Maurizio Boriani]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 01:31:41PM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> Funny, isn't it ;)

Yes it is! :)

> Yes, but maybe a different one than you think.  What about the following:
> 
> $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/image bs=1024k count=10
> $ mke2fs /image
> $ settrans -a /home /hurd/ext2fs /image
> 
> The purpose would be to use the underlying file as the store.  It would be
> hidden by the actual content of the filesystem, quite convenient ;)
> 
> You can even implement that in this case, "cat /image" does not return the
> binary representation of the root directory, but the underlying file
> itself!  Break the chains of Unix, this is the Hurd (but be careful not to
> confuse users too much by inconsistencies or levels of redirection).

It's a very good thing!

> $ settrans -a /gnu.tar.gz /hurd/tarfs /gnu.tar.tz
> $ cd /gnu; ls
> some_file
> some_other_file
> $ cat /gnu > /tmp/gnu.tar.gz
> # (/tmp/gnu.tar.gz is now a copy of the original tar file).
> 
> Other translators would just forward the accesses to the underlying
> directory hierarchy, but would maybe filter or log them somewhere.  For
> example shadowfs.
> 
> What do you think?
> 

I think translator are very good intruments, and I did't think what kind of 
powerfull and different applications them could have. I thinked them as 
ordinary unix tool, but I've understand they are a very break point with old 
generetion of U**X.

Thank you very much for your explaination, it's very usefull. Also excuse me 
for my wolf notification (remember child novel? :) )

bye and thanks anymore!

-- 
Maurizio Boriani -- Debian Developer
E-mail address: baux@debian.org
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