[X-Unix] Defragmenting?

[James Bucanek]

Kirk McElhearn wrote on Wednesday, February 18, 2004:

>Interesting question - if Panther apparently defragments any files that are
>20 MB or less whenever they are read, would that mean that updating the
>locate database would more or less defragment your disk? (Naturally, this
>wouldn't defragment large files, but would it, in essence, be defragmenting
>as it's reading all those files?)

Unless I'm saddly mistaken, the locate database only contains the *names* of files.  Updating the locate database won't actually read any files -- only the directories.  [ While 'file' will read a file for magic cookies, the documentation for locate and locate.updatedb only talk about filenames, not types. ]

On the other hand, you could run something like this:

    find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cat > /dev/null

However, I suspect that there's probably a limit to how many files the OS will queue up for defragmentation at one time.

______________________________________________________
James Bucanek       <mailto:privatereply at gloaming.com>