Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 October 14

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 14

Filesystems that can store subdirectories merged into parent?

Are there any filesystems, other than mounted archives, that can store a subdirectory as part of the parent directory (in the same cluster) in order to reduce pointer chasing, in cases where the parent directory has very few children? An example of where this would be useful is with Java source trees, because a package folder such as src/com/initech/projectfoo often has no siblings or uncles. NeonMerlin 05:31, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

The answer appears to be yes; see Inode#Inlining. There are other similar file system tricks such as tail packing. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 06:03, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

I suppose the question was about *ix filesystems, but NTFS also does this (inlining, not tail packing). -- BenRG (talk) 01:24, 15 October 2015 (UTC)